
E S S AY S 



CON NELL 




LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



Chap. Copyright No..- 

Shelf.lffi^ 



^5" 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



ESSAYS 
Practical and Speculative 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 



History of the American Episcopal Church. Eighth 
edition, illustrated. 8vo, cloth, - $2.00. 

A Year's Sermons. 12mo, cloth, - $1.25. 

Sons of God. A series of Sermons. 12mo, paper, 
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THOMAS WHITTAKER, Publisher 
2 & 3 BIBLE HOUSE, NEW YORK 



ESSAYS 



Practical and Speculative 



BY 

S. D. McCONNELL, D.D., D.C.L. 



NEW YORK 
THOMAS WHITTAKER 

2 AND 3 BIBLE HOUSE 
1900 



47557 





L ib***r y of Conarese 


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T'Uv (jpies Receiveo 


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SEP 15 1900 






Copy rig* < miry 












SECOND COPY. 






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OftDtfl DIVISION, 






SEP 21 1900 




J 


5OO94 




Copyright, 1900 


By 


THOMAS WHITTAK 


ER 



TO MY GOOD OLD FRIEND 

KOBEET W. GRANGE, D. D., 



THIS LITTLE BOOK 



Note. — I hereby make my sincere acknowledgment to the New 
World, the Churchman and the Outlook for their courteous permission 
to reprint portions of this little volume which have already appeared 
in their pages. 



Contents 



I. THE MORALS OF SEX . 
II. CHURCH AND CLERGY 

III. ABOUT THEOLOGICAL SEMINARIES 

IV. BROAD CHURCHMEN, AND NARROW 
V. THE NEXT STEP IN CHRISTIANITY 

VI. SCRIPTURE, INSPIRATION AND AUTHORITY, 
VII. THE FALL, — UPWARD 
VIII. THE ROLE OF BELIEF 
IX. GOD, EVEN OUR GOD 
X. THE NEW SITUATION 
XI. NATURE AND GOD 
XII. EVOLUTION AND GOD 

XIII. GOD MANIFEST . 

XIV. THE DOCTRINE OF THE CROSS 
XV. THE OTHER LIFE 

XVI. THE HOLY CATHOLIC CHURCH 



PAGE 

7 

33 

53 

75 

89 

107 

125 

117 

155 

169 

181 

191 

209 

233 

255 

273 



THE MOKALS OF SEX 



THE MORALS OF SEX 

Of all the Commandments in the Decalogue, the 
most difficult to enforce and expound is the Seventh. 
For the present purpose it is its exposition with which 
I am concerned, and it is the clergy chiefly that I have 
in mind in what I say. There are at least three rea- 
sons which make a discussion of the Law of Sexual 
Morality pertinent to us professionally. First, as offi- 
cial teachers of righteousness and ministers of disci- 
pline we are continually called upon to apply and in- 
terpret the law. Second, we are confronted with a new 
social and economic order which has introduced into this 
region of morals quite new and very profound difficul- 
ties. Third, in common with Protestantism generally, 
our Church is engaged in the attempt to formulate the 
law of the case in a Canon of Marriage and Divorce. 
These three reasons may also serve as the headings 
for the divisions of what is rather a memorandum for 
an argument than a symmetrical thesis. 

I. What, then, is God's law as to sex relation- 
ships ? Upon what sanction, human or divine, does 
the law rest? Is the same law binding upon men 
and women? 

To these questions the Social Purity League would 

9 



10 THE MOKALS OF SEX 

give one answer. The average practicing physician 
would give another. The law of the state is based 
upon ideas differing from both replies. The Church 
gives an answer differing somewhat from all of them. 
What is the actual will of God and the will of Nature 
on the subject? "We may be certain that the two 
wills will coincide. Usually if we can find out pre- 
cisely in any case what Nature wishes we may be 
quite sure that we have found out what is the will of 
God in that case. For Nature is God's way of ex- 
pressing Himself. 

But in the case of sex relationships it may as well 
be confessed that Nature does not seem to know her 
own mind. This is the origin of the whole moral con- 
fusion upon the subject. In regard to other appetites 
and desires Nature is a trustworthy guide. Their 
existence is prima facie proof of their innocence. 
They are warnings of needs. They protect them- 
selves against abuse by the sense of satiety. For 
other moral prohibitions the reason is so evident in 
the nature of things that the understanding is ready 
to uphold the conscience in its mandates. But in the 
case before us we cannot "follow the guidance of 
Nature.'' The instant that proposal is baldly made, 
all men see that it will not work. As a social rule, it 
is condemned by the practically unanimous vote of so- 
ciety. And it is not civilized and Christian society 
alone which condemns it. Unregulated intercourse at 
will is not permitted even by the lowest savages. 



THE MORALS OF SEX 11 

i 

Among the lower animals it is not possible. In men 
it is physically possible, but it is limited and regulated 
by social conventions. These limitations have the 
force of law, and are maintained by an appeal to re- 
ligion. What then are they, and ought they to be ? 

The first prohibition is of Adultery. "What is 
adultery? The legal definition is slightly different, 
but the practical definition is : sexual connection with 
another man's wife. In what does the wrong of the 
action consist ? The first answer is, it is a wrong to 
the woman's husband. This is the view which the law 
takes of the matter. This was the view of the Old 
Testament Scriptures. The adulterer was punished as 
a thief. He had trespassed upon another man's prop- 
erty. This is the Common Law doctrine to this day 
in Europe and America. The remedy for the " injured 
husband," — the phrase is significant, — is sought by an 
action to recover damages. Underlying it is the feel- 
ing surviving from ancient times that a wife is prop- 
erty. In quite modern practice has been introduced 
a legal fiction to put the wife on the same legal stand- 
ing as the husband, and she has been allowed also to 
sue for damages for " the alienation of the husband's 
affections." Courts and juries have always found it 
difficult, however, to assess the value of the thing 
sought to be recovered. 

But the punishment of the adulteress has always 
been reached on other grounds. Her offence has been 
estimated not by the damage inflicted upon the 



12 THE MORALS OF SEX 

wronged husband, but by the damage she has done to 
society. She has "defiled the blood." "Where so- 
ciety was organized, as in Israel, about the tribal 
principle, it is easy to see why she was so sternly 
dealt with for having " wrought eonf usion " in Israel. 
But the same quality must always distinguish the 
adulteress from the adulterer. The husband may 
wander among harlots, and in the view of law, the 
wrong which he does and which he incurs is personal 
to himself. But for the wife to admit an intruder is 
to confuse the inheritance. Her offence is against 
her father, her husband's father, her children, against 
the State. It vitiates, or at any rate renders uncertain, 
the testaments of all who have preceded her and her 
husband. In the sin of adultery the same judgment 
has never been meted to the man and the woman, and 
never can be. The implications of this we will meet 
again when we come to consider the moral basis of 
marriage and divorce. Practically, it is sufficient to 
say at this point that the offence is one which has al- 
ways been so sternly condemned by all men that we 
need not dwell longer upon it. Any man guilty of it 
flies in the face of Nature, society and God, and 
among the three he will find his punishment. 

But what about commerce of the sexes which does 
not involve the element of trespass and does not defile 
the blood ? What is the absolute and ideal right ? Is 
the law the same for all ? Should all be alike pun- 
ished for its breach ? Let us take this last question 



THE MORALS OF SEX 13 

i 

first. Should the man and the woman be held to the 
same accountability and be dealt with the same way ? 
The answer is, they cannot be. The cry " the same 
law of purity for both sexes," is both silly and mis- 
chievous. The champions of this crusade do not seem 
to perceive that in the leveling process attempted the 
woman is quite as likely to be dragged down as the 
man is to be led up. Set the ideal of manly purity as 
high as you will — as high as Christ does — but remem- 
ber that even then woman's purity must transcend it. 
Nothing is gained by ignoring facts. Society judges 
the woman's fault far more severely than it does the 
man's, simply because it believes the fault to be far 
more heinous in her than in him. One element in 
guaging the gravity of an offence against a rule is the 
consideration of the consequences of such offence. In 
this offence the woman is defiled in the body, in her 
emotional nature, in her affections, in her soul, to an 
extent and in a way which is not true of the man. In 
her case the consequences are conserved, retained, 
transmitted. In his they come to an end. His of- 
fence may have a moral aggravation far beyond hers, 
or it may not. But the same offence it is not, nor 
can, nor ought society to deal with her as with him. 
His penalty cannot be of the same kind as the one 
meted out to her. If he be threatened with that 
alone by well-meaning reformers and preachers, he 
can well afford to smile in their faces. Nothing is 
idler than the rhetoric about the injustice of the fact 



14 THE MORALS OF SEX 

that she is cast out to shame and cold while he is re- 
ceived to club and drawing-room. This has always 
been society's method, and always will be. The fault 
has demonstrated her to be incapable to discharge 
her social duty, while it has not conclusively shown 
his unfitness. 

From this the law of sexual purity for women, and 
the reasonableness of that law begins to appear. For 
them the law is absolute chastity. No excuse or pal- 
liation will be admitted in the judgment of human so- 
ciety. God's judgments, we may well believe, will be 
in many instances different. He can heed the plea, 
"she sinned much because she loved much." But 
society cannot. There is too much at stake. In her 
person society itself is defiled by the offence, and is 
compelled in self-defence to visit upon her a penalty 
which does not fall upon her partner. This may be 
called hard, unjust, unfair, atrocious, but that does 
not change the fact. Beside that, a closer examina- 
tion of all the data would probably show that it is not 
open to these charges. At any rate, it is the way 
in which woman herself deals with her offending 
sister. 

It is clear, therefore, that human society, presum- 
ably giving voice to the will of God, demands abso- 
lute continence (1) of all married men, under the 
penalty which attaches to a broken oath ; (2) of all 
women, under the penalty which attaches to any act 
which brings confusion into the social structure ; (3) 



THE MORALS OF SEX 15 

of all married women, under an additional penalty for 
debauching posterity. 

This leaves for consideration the case of those men 
who have contracted no obligations, whose incon- 
tinence does not seem to them to carry with it any 
evil consequence, whom society does not severely pun- 
ish, who find across their path only what seems to be 
an arbitrary prohibition. What will keep them con- 
tinent ? What ought to keep them continent ? What 
has Nature, what has God, what has the preacher to 
say to the young man here ? There is no department 
of morals where it is so difficult to speak honestly. 
There is no place where conventional morality, both 
in its teaching and result, or lack of result of its teach- 
ing, is so unsatisfactory. When the young man is 
bidden, " thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, thou 
shalt not commit adultery," he heeds. In all these 
cases he sees both the reason for the prohibition and 
the peril of the offence. But when he is bidden, " thou 
shalt not commit fornication," he heeds little. He 
knows that fornication is not adultery. The reasons 
for its condemnation are not so evident. They lie so 
deep down in the complex nature of things that he 
doubts their existence. The torment of an appetite 
which he knows to be " natural " drives him across a 
prohibiting line which he suspects to be " artificial." 

What shall the moralist, the physician, the priest 
say to these ? It would surely be a great gain if they, 
all three, can say the same thing. To the unmarried 



16 THE MOEALS OF SEX 

American woman, little needs to be said. She is 
chaste by habit, by tradition, by pride, by instinct, by 
temperament, by physical nature. She needs little 
exhortation. But what of the man ? How many are 
continent between the ages of twenty and thirty-five ? 
No one can say. Some are ; probably far more than 
is often supposed. But more are not. They say, 
when they speak at all on the subject, that it is " a 
counsel of perfection" to which they are not equal. 
They find no fault with the high demand which con- 
ventional morality exacts, but they regard it as im- 
possible of attainment. What considerations can we 
urge to give vigor to the young man's will by which 
he can bid his turbulent appetite come to heel? 
Christianity provides the supreme truth. It tells him 
that his body is the temple of a Holy Spirit. It warns 
him against defiling the temple of the Holy Ghost. 
It asks him if he will dare t6 "make the body of 
Christ the member of a harlot." There are thousands 
for whom this is sufficient. Their souls are inwardly 
reverent, and they compel their reluctant bodies to be 
at least outwardly respectful. 

But there are tens of thousands to whom this is not 
sufficient. For various reasons the spiritual dynamic 
of Christianity does not touch them. Has the law of 
purity any other hold upon them ? 

There would seem to be at least two facts which we 
can fairly urge to bid them pause. The one is the 
peril to the body ; the other is the peril to the soul. 



THE MORALS OF SEX 17 

Let us not be misunderstood. We do not well to 
flourish threats of death to the body or of damnation 
to the soul. But there are a thousand ills which stop 
far short of either dissolution or damnation, which are 
nevertheless so grave that none but a fool will take 
chances with them. Fear may be a low motive, but 
the appeal to it is not unworthy. Indeed it probably is 
in point of fact the most common of sanctions. The 
man who buys sexual indulgence habitually, takes 
risks of bodily damage which none but a fool would 
incur. He imperils his subsequent life ; the health of 
his wife who is to be ; the life and self-respect of his 
unborn children. Does he smile and say, " I'll take 
the chances " ? Would it not be well if we could per- 
suade the experienced physician to say to him : " I 
have heard men say that ; and I have seen them after- 
ward, when they wished that they had at least died 
before they were damned ! " 

There is another penalty, however, about which 
Nature is inexorable. It is none the less natural be- 
cause it happens to be a law of human nature. Why 
is pure lust not immoral in a beast ? And why is it 
immoral in a man? Because in the beast it is not 
correlated with the affections, and in the man it is. 
" Making a beast of one's self " is not a metaphor. It 
is a scientific statement of a possibility. It is accom- 
plished by eliminating the humane element from any 
human act and thus reducing it to the deed of an animal. 
But this can only be done at the expense of the human 



18 THE MORALS OF SEX 

part of Nature. If it be done repeatedly, the humane 
element is injured. II it be done habitually, the 
humane element is destroyed. Nature is leisurely but 
unerring in her revenges. If one should then be 
counselled by the complaisant physician, who knows 
only the body, to " seek health by the temperate grati- 
fication of an appetite," the religious adviser may be 
allowed to intervene and say, "the doctor's advice 
would, no doubt, be good if it concerned an appetite 
which had in it no quality but physical. Your pre- 
scription would be well for a beast ; for a man it is 
not well." Incontinence of the body means deteriora- 
tion of the soul. This would be just as true though 
the Bible had never been written, and though there 
were not a preacher of morality in the world. " The 
house of the strange woman opens unto death, and 
her paths unto the dead." The soul which goes there 
sickens, and dies if it abides there. This is the price 
which Nature fixes. Any cost of self-repression is 
cheaper. In this, Solomon, Kobert Burns, St. Paul, 
and the Great Physician agree. 

I have not mentioned the crime of seduction in any 
of its forms. The man who is capable of taking ad- 
vantage of youth, ignorance, inexperience, or of 
woman's love for the gratification of his lust, or the 
rare, but still existent, wanton woman who plays and 
preys upon " the imperious instinct of man," are both 
alike beyond argument. They are condemned al- 
ready. 



THE MORALS OF SEX 19 

11 Who cast the devils from the Gaddarene, 
Could hardly do so much for these I ween." 

II. I said that we are confronted by a new social 
and economic order which has greatly aggravated the 
difficulties in this region of morals. In a simple social 
structure each man and each woman is mated and 
mated early. Physical appetite is transfigured by af- 
fection, and held in check by the responsibility of 
parentage. But each generation the average age of 
marriage is being pushed farther onward, and the per- 
centage of unmarried men and women increases. 
Within the last fifty years the average age of mar- 
riage in New York State has been pushed upward, for 
men from about twenty-two to about twenty-seven, and 
for women from nineteen to twenty-four, as near as can 
be deduced from the very imcomplete statistics. 
Speaking generally two causes are at work to bring 
about this result. First, the increasing exigency of 
life, and second, the increasing personal independence 
of women. Suppose the man is a professional man. 
He leaves the preparatory school at nineteen, leaves 
the university at twenty-two, leaves the technical 
school at twenty-six. Assume for him at the outset 
even more than average professional success. He 
cannot and does not marry until he has passed thirty. 
Suppose he goes at once from the public high school 
at nineteen to learn a skilled trade or to go into busi- 
ness, he cannot get to the point when he can marry 
and live in this city much earlier. Only the unskilled 



20 THE MOEALS OF SEX 

laborer can marry shortly after maturity, because his 
ability to support a family is at its best from twenty- 
four to thirty-four, and rapidly declines thereafter. 

The case of women is the same, with aggravating 
circumstances. The butcher's daughter and the bak- 
er's now remain in the public school until nineteen or 
twenty. I was present lately at the opening exercises 
of a high school containing two thousand four hundred 
young women, the majority of whom were older than 
their grandmothers had been when their mothers were 
born. Do not understand me to be making an argu- 
ment for " early marriages." I am not making an 
argument at all. I am trying to make a diagnosis. 
We are set to preach purity. To do so effectively we 
must know to whom we are preaching. We are sur- 
rounded by thousands and thousands of unmarried 
men and women who remain unmarried for a length 
of time, far longer than has ever been known in any 
other time and place. The men are journeymen 
mechanics, clerks, commercial travellers, salesmen, 
lawyers, engineers, doctors. The women are college 
graduates, shop girls, factory girls, saleswomen, 
stenographers, and myriads of young women living 
aimless lives in dull homes, waiting while their bloom 
fades for the man to speak, who cannot speak because 
he cannot make a home to which to invite her. 

But what of the " imperious instinct " meanwhile ? 
Love of life and the instinct of generation are the two 
elemental forces. Society has safeguarded life, made 



THE MORALS OF SEX 21 

/ 

it comfortable, lengthened it. Never was human life 
so secure, so pleasant, so easy. American society has 
certainly succeeded in its aim at " life, liberty, and the 
pursuit of happiness." But does any one suppose that 
the companion "instinct of propagation" can be 
ignored, or forgotten or suppressed without it having 
its revenges ? Does society do well to make individ- 
ual life easy and homes difficult ? After a young 
man has lived for five years at a Mills' hotel, and a 
young woman in a Young Women's Christian Asso- 
ciation boarding-house, will they be more or less likely 
to combine their lives in the narrowness of a home ? 
One is tempted to ponder upon the proverb that " the 
wise ones of the world are kept busy undoing the 
deeds of the good ones." The hard fact confronts us 
that the sex instincts of nature are more and more 
obstructed by the exigencies of human society. Con- 
tinence is subjected to a longer and ever more severe 
strain. Is it surprising that it breaks down ? What 
reinforcement can the minister of religion bring to 
the continent will which finds itself called upon to ar- 
bitrate between the law of the mind and the law of 
the members, after the contest has been artificially 
prolonged beyond the time which Nature has decreed ? 
It may be well to say at this point that I assume the 
appetite of sex to be just as legitimate and as noble as 
any appetite whatsoever. Indeed one might say 
much more. Whosoever shall penetrate the ultimate 
mystery of sex will have gone far to know the es- 



22 THE MOEALS OF SEX 

sential nature of God. Creation and procreation are 
more nearly allied than are any other motions of the 
Creator and the creature. The religion of Christ 
ought by now to have recovered from the sickly taint 
of asceticism with which the mumified corpse of dual- 
ism infected it in the Thebaid centuries ago. The 
monk and cloistered nun have never been altogether 
sane. Their confessions, their hymns and prayers, 
their theology and casuistry proclaim them less than 
Christian because less than human. I believe that we 
will never be able to urge and interpret God's law of 
chastity except as we honestly and reverently recog- 
nize the truth that " in God's image created He them, 
male and female created He them." It may well be 
that just now the most efficient way in which we can 
preach personal purity shall be by addressing our- 
selves to the correction of some of those things in the 
social and economic order which make impossible that 
condition of things which God contemplated when He 
promulgated His law. 

III. We are concerned with the application of the 
Christian law of sex relationships to divorce and remar- 
riage. This discussion usually commences with an 
array of statistics to show the rapidly increasing num- 
ber of divorces. I will assume the figures. Let us 
admit the extreme. In one state there is one di- 
vorce for every six marriages. In other states they 
range from this downward to South Carolina where 
there are none. The fact of consequence is that there 



THE MORALS OF SEX 23 

has been and is a rapidly increasing disposition to 
break the bonds of matrimony when they begin to 
chafe, — and in a less marked degree a disposition for 
those thus made free to contract new alliances. There 
is so little question of the facts that it would be time 
wasted even to exhibit them. 

But the second step in the discussion is usually to 
argue that all this indicates a prevailing laxity of 
sexual morality, and a perilous lowering of the ideal 
relations of man and woman. This I believe to be an 
error. A careful examination of the facts will show 
that, taking the country as a whole, a slow but steady 
advance in chastity has occurred much in the same 
way as has occurred the advance in temperance. The 
multiplication of divorces is not to be accounted for 
by the division of the sum total of popular morality. 
If this were the situation the Church's task would be 
a very simple, even though not an easy one. But the 
reasons are far more complicated. Speaking broadly, 
it may truly be said that Christianity itself has caused 
the present multiplication of divorces. Every intelli- 
gent student of Christianity has noted the way in 
which it began almost at once to change the status of 
woman in society. It began by crediting her with an 
independent personality. But the accumulated tradi- 
tions of countless generations stood between her and 
the conscious realization of her personality. In all 
human society she stood in a position of less dignity 
than that of a slave or even of a chattel. A bonds- 



24 THE MORALS OF SEX 

man or an ox had at least an individuality of its own. 
The woman had not. She was an appendage of some 
man — of a father, a husband, a brother, or even a son. 
All law, all custom, all social order, all domestic life was 
built upon this conception of woman. Even St. Paul 
asserts it and bases his dicta upon it. But what is of 
more significance, this was woman's conception of her- 
self. And woman is, as Amiel says, " the very genius 
of conservatism." 

The glory of Christianity is that it has at long last 
succeeded in bringing woman to conceive of her own 
personality as Christ conceived of it. The process has 
been a marvellously slow one. Indeed it is only 
within our own time that the result has begun to 
show in any large way. The phenomenon is not 
fitly termed the " emancipation of woman." It is not 
"emancipation." It is not "independence." It is a 
coming to consciousness of self. The free woman in 
Christ is not thereby- set in opposition to men, or 
transformed into a man in all save bodily function. 
It has nothing to do with the " suffrage " or with the 
"right to earn her own living." But this new-found 
consciousness of absolute and underived personality 
has given to her a new-found, and sometimes bewil- 
dering sense of her personal dignity and personal 
sanctity. This is what we wish, what Christ in- 
tended, what we would not have turned backward. 
But when this stage has been reached why should we 
be amazed if she turn to society and ask, sometimes 



THE MORALS OF SEX 25 

tearfully and sometimes defiantly, " Am I a person ? 
Am I not the owner of my own body? Can Chris- 
tian law under any conceivable circumstances lay an 
obligation upon me, or so construe any promise which 
I have made, as to command me to give my body to 
the embrace of any man against my will?" Thus 
Christianity itself has led not a few women to the 
point where their religion prompts them to take an 
action the precise opposite to that which devout 
women of an earlier stage would have taken. At that 
earlier stage a devoted woman endured to her life's end 
the approaches of a brutal or drunken or distasteful 
husband because her religious sense bade her do so. 
To-day her equally pious granddaughter utterly re- 
fuses such outrage of her personality because her 
religious sense bids her so ! Divorce is just as likely 
to be the result of a higher moral ideal as of a lower 
one. "We may as well face the fact that marriage is 
coming more and more to be thought of as a mutual 
contract betw r een two self-contained persons than as 
the absorption of the wife's personality by the hus- 
band's. And Christianity has done this by transform- 
ing the woman from a possession into a person. Do 
we wish that undone ? If not, then all the exhorta- 
tion of the " conservative " — who is the man with his 
eyes in the back of his head — all his exhortations to 
bring back what he calls the " primitive basis of the 
marriage bond," is idle. The sacred marriage estate 
lies before us, not behind. I am willing to say that 



26 THE MOKALS OF SEX 

for one I believe that in most cases where divorces 
are actually granted it is better upon the whole for 
the state to loose the bans which have become fetters 
than to hold them fast, — better for the men and 
women concerned, better for society, better for pub- 
lic morals. In point of fact they never were those 
"whom God had joined together." As to the re- 
marriage of the severed individuals, that is quite a 
different question, and a far more difficult one, both 
for the state and the Church. But this is the stage 
at which the Church comes face to face with the 
problem. 

Concerning a first marriage it would seem that the 
Church could do no more than she has already done. 
That is to warn the young man and maiden who ask 
her benediction upon their vows that " if any persons 
be joined together otherwise than as God's word doth 
allow, their marriage is not lawful." Shall she at- 
tempt to pass judgment upon the facts in each in- 
stance ? If so, what is to be her measure or standard 
of legality ? If by " God's word " here she mean the 
written scriptures she simply cannot derive from them 
a working statute. They were not written for such a 
purpose. If she mean the ideal prerequisites and con- 
ditions of Christian marriage, as is the practical con- 
struction of the phrase, then she can do no more than 
adjure them by the sober warning of judgment to 
come, that " if there be any impediment they do now 
confess it." The practical outcome of the common 



THE MORALS OF SEX 27 

admonitions of our more or less reverend fathers in 
God that we should look with more care to the origi- 
nal marriages, seems to me to amount to this and 
nothing more. 

But what of the remarriage of those who have been 
divorced? Shall the Church forbid it absolutely? 
Shall she forbid it, with exceptions ? Shall she per- 
mit it absolutely ? Whichever she decides upon, what 
shall be the ground upon which she shall rest her 
decision ? 

The real difficulty is with the last question. What 
^6- the law Avhich governs the Christian Church in this 
cause? And where is it written? Many, possibly 
most, will repty, the law is in the New Testament. I 
think they are mistaken. Christ enunciated no law 
of marriage and divorce. He did that which was 
ultimately to make marriage a sacrificial symbol and 
separation an impossibility, but not by dictating 
statutes. He did for the Seventh Commandment 
what He did for the Sixth and the Eighth, and waited 
for time to show the result. " Thou shalt not kill," 
says the law : Christ gives it the dynamic, " whoso- 
ever hateth his brother is a murderer." " Thou shalt 
not steal " becomes dynamical through His, " love thy 
neighbor as thyself." "Thou shalt not commit 
adultery." "Whoso looketh with lust is an adul- 
terer." The attempt to extract a canon from the 
words of Christ is the medigeval philosopher's task to 
distill bottles full of elixir of life out of the morning 



28 THE MORALS OF SEX 

dew. "My words are spirit, and they are life." 
When the exegete sets about with purblind eye to ex- 
amine the words through the opaque lens of learning 
for the purpose of turning his rendering over to the 
canonist to be written in the black letter of ecclesias- 
tical law, the Christian can only go about his business, 
— and wait with what patience he can. 

The history of the Christian society is the gradual 
unfolding of the work of Christ in this cause as in all 
others. The early Christians did not conceive polyg- 
amy to be inconsistent with their profession. As a 
matter of expediency it was agreed that the clergy 
must be monogamists. But there would have been no 
meaning in the mandate, " let a bishop be the husband 
of one wife," if the same rule had antecedently been 
regarded as binding upon clergy and laity alike. And 
how could the early Christians take that attitude hav- 
ing only the Old Testament in their hands, and the 
New not yet written ? It may be a surprise to be re- 
minded that the Catholic Church has not to this day 
officially pronounced that the possession of a plurality 
of wives is per se a bar to membership. It is still an 
open question whether a missionary in pagan land 
may withhold baptism from a sincere convert until 
he put away all his wives but one. As a matter of 
fact Christ has eradicated polygamy as He has done 
slavery by slowly producing individuals whose nature 
is such that they cannot be either polygamists or 
slaves. Can the same method be trusted to eradi- 



THE MORALS OF SEX 29 

cate the ancient custom of divorce ? Surely we must 
think so. 

But what can the Church do meanwhile ? I reply, 
she may make such, and only such canonical regula- 
tions as are not for her ultra vires. Let me say here, 
in passing, what has been often said by wise Church- 
men, that our Church is exposed to peculiar danger from 
the lack of any judicial tribunal to determine the limit 
of her right to legislate upon any cause. If a secular 
legislature pass a law which it has really no power to 
do, a supreme court so adjudges, and the law at once 
becomes nul and void. In our Church the people are 
only fairly well saved from such legislation by the fact 
that what we call the common law of the Church is so 
generally respected, and by the further fact that vio- 
lation of canonical law is so uncommonly easy and 
free from danger. 

From the beginning it has been admitted that the 
Church may make such regulations for the conduct of 
the clergy as she deems expedient, provided the com- 
mon rights of Christian people are not encroached 
upon. Thus she has forbidden the clergy to bear arms, 
to submit to the trial by combat, to marry, to engage in 
unseemly avocations, and such like. All these regula- 
tions rest upon expediency, and are of their nature 
transitory, local, may be modified, or revoked when 
conditions change. On this ground I think the clergy 
may well be instructed not to officiate at the remar- 
riage of any divorced person. If such a canonical 



30 THE MORALS OF SEX 

prohibition were passed I would cheerfully obey it. 
I should vote for such a canon. Practically, I see no 
other course open to the Church at the present stage. 
The clergy must either be left free to marry any and 
all divorced persons or must be forbidden to marry any. 
Discrimination is not possible for the obvious reason 
that the Church possesses no machinery of her own by 
which to ascertain the facts concerning any case of di- 
vorce, and she cannot commit her action to the formal 
decisions of secular court without by that act com- 
mitting ecclesiastical suicide. Let the Church forbid 
the clergy to remarry divorced persons ; — and let her 
stop right there. 

I say, stop right there, because the Church cannot 
see her way any farther at present. ISTo agreement 
can now be reached as to what marriages God's word 
doth allow, and what ones it doth disallow. Some 
maintain that marriage is indissoluble for any cause ; 
some that adultery by either party vacates it abso- 
lutely ; some that such breach of vow only releases the 
other party to the extent of separation a mensa et 
thoro ; some that the secular law fixes the status of 
every individual in this regard so that the Church is 
free to bless any marriage when the state pronounces 
the parties marriageable. All appeal to the dicta of 
Christ as recorded and interpreted in the New Testa- 
ment. 

Now, while this situation continues the Church dare 
not go any farther in exercising discipline upon the 



THE MOEALS OF SEX 31 

laity than she has already done in her rubrics. By 
fundamental Catholic law and custom there are only 
two offences for which a citizen in Christ's visible 
Kingdom may be expelled. They are, first, notorious 
uncharitableness : i. <?., the demonstrated absence of 
the Christian spirit ; and second, notorious evil living, 
i. e., the demonstrated absence of the Christian con- 
duct. Under this later rubric the priest ex-communi- 
cates for a breach of the Seventh Commandment when 
the offence has come to be common knowledge. He 
needs no canonical permission to deal with an offence 
whose definition has been already determined. What 
then of the case of communicants who have been 
legally divorced, let us say for desertion, and have 
been remarried, let us say by a magistrate, who be- 
lieve that they have violated no law of God, and who are 
living a sober life, and are regarded by the community 
as upright men or women ? Shall the Church ex-com- 
municate them ? If so, on what ground ? Are they 
adulterers ? ]S T ot unless the Church shall have by her 
obiter dicta added to the definition of adultery. But 
if the Church may arbitrarily label an action adultery, 
and punish it under the Seventh Commandment, she 
may with equal right label stock-broking theft, and 
punish it under the Eighth Commandment, or pro- 
nounce a manager of the Brooklyn Rapid Transit 
System a murderer, and ex-communicate him under the 
Sixth. But are they " notorious evil livers " ? Clearly 
not, for the Christian community in which they live 



32 THE MORALS OF SEX 

does not so regard them. What, then, shall the 
Church do with them ? I answer, do what the Church 
is commissioned to do ; exhort, teach, illuminate, — and 
wait. But the kingdom of heaven is not to be taken 
by violence, nor is the citizen to be expelled by vio- 
lence. The sons of thunder are not the apostles 
whose proposed legislation the Master approves. 

There are two quite distinct questions before the 
Church now, and much depends upon this distinction 
coming to be seen and acknowledged. The regula- 
tion of the action of the clergy is one thing: that 
can be fixed arbitrarily, can be changed as conditions 
change, need not rest upon any final declaration by the 
Church of the intrinsic nature of the thing allowed or 
forbidden. But the discipline of the laity is quite a 
different thing. They have rights which cannot be 
taken away by arbitrary statutes. " Let a man so ex- 
amine himself before he presume to eat of that bread 
or drink of that cup," is the formula of the original 
charter. Possibly he may eat and drink damnation. 
That is his affair. 

A great bishop said wisely that he had rather see 
England free than sober. Better that the ecclesiastical 
state should be free than that it should be beyond re- 
proach. 



CHUKCH AND CLEKGY 



n 

CHUECH AND CLEEGY 

No doubt the experience of every clergyman who 
has a large acquaintance among his brethren is the 
same as my own in one particular, that is, that we are 
kept continually heart-sore by the stories which are 
confided to us by men who are either out of work or 
who are doing their work under conditions which 
they feel to be hopeless. 

For instance, here is a priest under forty, who was 
for eight years the rector of a prosperous parish in a 
southwestern state. His salary was satisfactory and 
his work in every way to his liking ; he was recog- 
nized to be an able man in the Church and in the 
community. His wife contracted malaria. Year by 
year he saw himself being gradually closed in to an 
awful dilemma. Either he must resign and go away, 
facing the chances of starvation, or he must stay and 
see his wife die. He resigned, as any honorable man 
would have done. The question now is, What is 
there for him to do ? I know that at this point there 
are not a few who would make the suggestion, pri- 
vately, if not publicly, that he had no business ever to 
have had a wife at all. This suggestion I will con- 
sider later on. 

35 



36 CHURCH AND CLERGY 

Here is another instance : A man who has been 
for ten years, and still is, rector of a church in a por- 
tion of a city from which the people are moving 
away. When he began his work everything was 
hopeful, and he did his duty with confidence in the 
future. As the years passed on, however, confidence 
gave place to doubtfulness, doubt was succeeded by 
fear, and fear gave place to despair. His brethren 
of the clergy, to whom he has quietly talked of the 
situation, have done their best again and again to se- 
cure some more hopeful field for him, but so far in 
vain. There he is, a strong man, a good man, eating 
out his heart in a task which is absolutely hopeless. 
What can he do ? 

Take still another case : Here is a man who came 
into the Church four years ago from the Presby- 
terians. He is a scholar and a gentleman, and is a 
distinct addition to the strength of the ministry as 
a whole. He resigned the pastorate of a substantial 
and prosperous church and came to us. He was able 
to maintain himself and his family with some degree 
of comfort during the dreadful year of quarantine 
which our canons demand. ISTow he is ready and 
capable of doing as good work as is to be found in the 
Church. Is there any place for him ? 

After being disturbed in mind for a long time by 
these and similar concrete instances, I determined to 
settle once and for all, to my own satisfaction, the 
elementary question, i. e., Is there any place in the 



CHURCH AND CLERGY 37 

i 

ministry for the men I have described ? In order to 
do so, I sent to every bishop of a diocese or missionary 
jurisdiction in this country the following letter : 

"My dear Bishop: 

" I beg that you will not think that I trespass when 
I ask you to do me the great favor to tell whether or 
not there may be in your diocese an opening at pres- 
ent, or in the near future, for a priest who seeks 
work ? The man I have in mind is about thirty-five 
years old, a gentleman, a Prayer Book Churchman, a 
good preacher, and has been successful in his two 
previous charges. He has a wife and two children. 
I do not see how he could live upon less than $1,000 a 
year, with a house. 

" Is there a place in your diocese for such a man ? 
Or have you a place where such a man might have 
an assured, even if meagre, support for a couple of 
years while he should make a position for himself ! 

" I am sorry to trouble you, but I would esteem it 
a great favor if you will let me know, in a word, 
whether or not such a place might be looked for with 
you. Yery sincerely vours, 

" S. D. McConnell." 

This letter was sent to about seventy bishops. I 
have received replies from fifty-nine of them. These 
included the Bishops of Maine, Vermont, Massachu- 
setts, Khode Island, Connecticut, New York, Albany, 
Long Island, Central New York, New Jersey, Penn- 
sylvania, Central Pennsylvania, Pittsburg, Delaware, 
Maryland, Washington, Kentucky, Virginia, Illinois, 
Springfield, Southern Ohio, Missouri, Kansas, Ten- 
nessee, Georgia, Michigan, Milwaukee, Duluth, Min- 
nesota, Colorado and Nebraska and many others. 



38 CHUECH AND CLEEGY 

They all reply that there is not now, or likely to be, 
in the near future, any opening for such a man as I 
described. The two exceptions are, one in a north- 
western diocese, where the bishop mentioned a vacant 
parish which paid a salary of $1,200 a year. He said, 
farther, that to his knowledge the vestry had more 
than thirty candidates under consideration, and that 
he himself had named three, none of which were 
satisfactory to the vestry. The other vacancy was in 
the diocese of Albany. If there is any better way in 
which to secure an accurate statement of the exact 
situation concerning supply and demand in the 
Church, I don't know it. I have asked every bishop 
in the Church if he knows of any place where a first- 
rate man with a wife and two children, a man who 
has been successful, who is a good preacher, a good 
parish worker, a good citizen, and who resigned his 
last parish for reasons which were perfectly satisfac- 
tory, can have a bare living for himself and his fam- 
ily. The reply is that there are just two such places 
in the American Church, and that there are forty men 
who want each of them. 

The bishops in their replies have a uniform tone of 
despondency which is most striking. One, the bishop 
of one of the dioceses in Penns}^lvania, says : " I have 
nothing to offer suitable for a man with a family. 
Indeed the ' family ' part is becoming more and more 
a serious drawback." The Bishop of Massachusetts 
writes : " One of the burdens of my life is writing just 



CHURCH AND CLERGY 39 

/ 

such letters as this. In to-day's mail, for instance, I 
received this and another letter of similar purport. I 
have been at my office two hours and have had two 
clergymen in with the same request. I am sometimes 
tempted to write an article and head it, l What is the 
matter with the Church ! ' " The Bishop of New 
Jersey says : " There is not a vacant parish or mission 
at this time in this diocese." The Bishop of Connec- 
ticut says : " Facts like these make one of the heaviest 
burdens of this office." One of the oldest and most 
distinguished bishops in the Church, whose name I do 
not feel at liberty to mention, says : " It seems to me 
that before a long time it will be found that we have 
more men than places, more clergy, such as they are, 
than supporting parishes. I say this partially because 
some years ago I gave much time, effort and exhor- 
tation to the increase of the ministry. This is the 
season of confession." The Bishop of Washington 
writes : " The majority of the salaries in this diocese 
are less than $700 a year. We have a splendid corps 
of clergy doing most valuable work ; it is a constant 
surprise to me that we could secure them on such 
terms." 

In a majority of cases the bishops volunteered to say 
that the average salaries of their clergy were from 
$500 to $800 per year. 

Now let us see precisely what the situation is. I am 
not speaking at all of that more or less numerous body 
of impracticable, incapable, restless clergy, who either 



40 CHUECH AND CLERGY 

have nothing to give to a parish which is worth pay- 
ing for or who will not remain long enough in any 
one parish to let the people discover it. Nor do I 
have in mind that practically exhaustless number 
of clergymen of other churches who would gladly 
enter our ministry if they were able to see any proba- 
bility of a livelihood therein. I speak of the support 
which may be fairly counted upon by strong, earnest 
and capable men. I asked for one such $1,000 and a 
house for the support of himself and his family. 
There are only two such places vacant at this moment 
in the American Church, the bishops being the wit- 
nesses. Is the demand which I make for this man un- 
reasonable ? It is the wages of a carpenter, of a sales- 
man in a department store, less than that of a brick- 
layer. To qualify him to discharge the duties of his 
office the Church required him to spend at least five 
years, and more probably seven, in special preparation. 
Nor, again, do I bring any accusation against the 
laity for failure to do their duty ; I have no faith 
in such accusations. I believe that the laity will pay 
for the support of just so many and just such kind of 
clergy as are needed to discharge the priest's office in 
the Church of God. If for any reason the Church 
sees fit by its methods to distribute the aggregate 
amount contributed by the laity for this purpose 
among more priests than are needed, there will be just 
so much less for each one. If the Church retains in 
her ministry men who do not actually give the goods 



CHURCH AND CLERGY 41 

i 

which the laity have a right to expect, the laity will 
decline to pay. Mere scolding or exhortation will 
have no effect in the premises. 

But if the facts are as I have stated, there are sev- 
eral classes of people who ought to know it. First of 
all are the candidates for orders. If it be true, as I 
believe it is, that the time has arrived when, generally 
speaking, every young man entering the ministry must 
expect to make his own parish, and not to find one 
ready to hand, it is clearly desirable that he should 
have this fact drawn to his attention early. 

The situation is new. Twenty years ago the aver- 
age young man ready to be ordained might fairly 
take for granted that there was waiting for him 
somewhere in the American Church a place either as 
an assistant in a large parish or as rector in a small 
one, or as missionary at some post where the Church 
was ready to send him. At that date the bishops 
were seeking for men. They were writing hither and 
thither to inquire if one might perchance know of a 
suitable man to fill such and such a vacancy. At that 
date the missionary bishops used to visit the theolog- 
ical schools in order to secure, if possible, a promise 
from members of the junior class that they would go 
to their jurisdictions three years later. Now the whole 
situation is changed. What has caused the change ? 
What will cure it ? 

These are large and very difficult questions. If I 
venture to state some things which seem to me to be 



42 CHURCH AND CLERGY 

the causes, I trust that it will not be regarded as an 
impertinence. It is only an expression of opinion, 
after all, and one man's opinion is as free as another's. 
If any one can point out causes which will appear 
more real than those I suggest, I shall be only too 
glad to withdraw my own and to accept his. 

Probably the chief cause of the condition of things 
now existing is one which is not confined to us. It is 
operating with bewildering rapidity in the whole 
United States. It is that sweeping change which is 
going on in the religious habits of the people. For 
many centuries the Church has encircled a multitude 
of "nominal adherents," probably larger than the 
number of the disciples. From Constantine's time 
until within our own generation the Church has been 
supported in large part by the money of those who 
never were Christians. During many centuries, and 
throughout the Christian world, this money came in 
as the proceeds of a general tax levy. People paid for 
the Church, just as to-day they pay for the public 
schools, whether they cared or did not care to use it. 
When Church and State were separated, as in the 
United States, these same nominal Christians contin- 
ued for a long time to do from use and wont what 
they had previously done by legal mandate. They at- 
tended church with more or less regularity, and they 
contributed toward its support. Public opinion com- 
pelled them. To have no " church connection " was a 
social stigma, So, too, to be an habitual non-church- 



CHURCH AND CLERGY 43 

goer gave suspicion of moral obliquity. There was a 
feeling in the community that any man might reason- 
ably be called upon to help build or support a church, 
whether he was a member of the church or not. The 
banker, the politician, the society man, even the gam- 
bler in a mining camp, responded to this social coer- 
cion. They do so yet, but in a lessening degree. We 
are within sight of the time when they will not do so 
at all. When the Church asked for a complete sepa- 
ration from the State she did not altogether realize 
how complete that separation would become. She 
thought only of separating from institutions with 
which she had no part. It ends by separating from 
multitudes of people who had no part with her. Our 
own Church will suffer more by this falling away than 
will any other. We have had a far larger proportion 
in the congregation who are not members of the 
Church than has any other. They have been con- 
tributors, workers, vestrymen. But the time is in 
sight when they will be so no longer. Their falling 
away is not an apostasy. Nor is it the result of any 
decadence in the morals of the people who once were 
in our churches and now are not. It is simply due to 
the fact that now society has taken the ground that 
some "church connection" is not necessary to social 
standing or to moral respectability. The Church is 
rapidly returning to the position in which it was in the 
primitive ages. Then, the most it hoped for was to 
be let alone. Then Constantine came and gave it rich 



44 CHURCH AND CLERGY 

donations — but did not join it. Now he is about to 
withdraw, and we will no more have the contributions 
of him or his kind. That this change in the situation 
has come about so suddenly will surprise no one who 
studies the history of social movements. It is just the 
action which Protestantism has been preparing for 
during four centuries. It took a long time to get 
ready for the movement. Our own generation will 
probably be long enough for the action itself. This 
goes far to account for the present excess of clergy 
everywhere. The supply was adjusted to a condition 
of things which endured up to hardly more than 
twenty years ago, but which is well-nigh gone to-day. 

It is with unfeigned reluctance and real trepida- 
tion that I go on to point out some causes of cler- 
ical indigence which, in my judgment, operate par- 
ticularly within our own Church. I know that many 
will disagree with me, and that some may take um- 
brage. I can only plead that if what I say shall prove 
to be the truth, it ought to be said. If it be not true, 
it will hurt no one. 

I would name, first, therefore, the enormous ad- 
vance of the "priestly" conception of the ministry 
which has come in within the last quarter of a cen- 
tury. The " Oxford Movement " has something to its 
credit, but it has much also to its debit side. Wher- 
ever it has gained control in any area, in that area 
the clergy are poorly paid. And not only so, but in 
the same places the gifts of the laity for Church propa- 



CHURCH AND CLERGY 45 

gation are most meagre. If any one will look over 
the list of the parishes which sustain the Board of 
Missions he will see the truth of this. There is only 
one conspicuous exception, and that a brilliant one, 
where in a great parish the priests are paid by the 
dead hand of men who while they lived, thought little 
of priests. Speaking generally, the parishes and 
dioceses wherein the " priestly " idea has been most 
completely exploited are those where the laity are 
least willing to give the priest a living salary. The 
bishop of the diocese in which that idea has been al- 
lowed its freest course says, in his last convention ad- 
dress : " We have been in the diocese twenty } r ears, 
and in only a single instance has a missionary ap- 
propriation been voluntarily surrendered." Of course, 
it is open to the priest to retort : " So much the more 
shame to the laity for forgetting the apostolic in- 
junction that they who preach the gospel should live 
by the gospel." Maybe so. But suppose the laity 
should reply : " If you will try for a while to preach 
the gospel we will try to see that you do live ! " A 
man is only paid for the thing which he does. If he 
be thoroughly equipped to perform sacerdotal func- 
tions, an equipment procured, maybe, at great cost of 
labor, of study and practice, and find that so small a 
percentage of the community want the things which 
he has to give sufficiently to pay for them, what is he 
to say ? He may say : " They are precious things, 
men ought to want them ; they ought to gladly wel- 



46 CHURCH AND CLERGY 

come and honor the man who brings them." Maybe 
so, again. But it may be worth while to remind him 
that the men to whom he would thus speak are not 
within the sound of his voice. I am constrained to 
believe that the exploitation of the priestly at the ex- 
pense of the prophetic side of the ministerial office, 
with the dogmatism, pettiness, hardness, and super- 
ciliousness which so often attend thereupon, will go 
far to explain why the laity are slow to pay living 
stipends. Surely there must be some explanation of 
the fact that so many priests of blameless life, of burn- 
ing zeal, of tireless activity, are so insufficiently main- 
tained while they do their offices. 

The second cause in order, though possibly the first 
in influence, is the spread of the " Free Church Idea." 
It is a source of congratulation to the advocates of 
that idea that something like eighty-five per cent, of 
our churches are " free." The root principle of the 
free church propaganda is that the attendant at a 
Christian church cannot rightly have his attendance 
made conditional upon his agreeing to pay any fixed 
sum toward the support of the Church. This is the 
heart of the contention. I do not propose to contro- 
vert the claim farther than to say that it seems to me 
to rest upon an astonishing confusion of ideas. To 
argue that because the gospel is free, therefore 
churches should be free, is like arguing that because 
water is free, therefore men should not be required to 
pay taxes for the water they draw from the hydrant. 



CHURCH AND CLERGY 47 

But what I call attention to is the effect which has 
been produced upon the people hj twenty-five years' 
preaching of this demoralizing error. I am quite 
aware that experience has taught the folly of it in 
many cases. In my own city two of the most con- 
spicuous " free " churches have abandoned their 
theory, and a third and more conspicuous parish would 
gladly do so if it could. But the mischief has been 
done. For a quarter of a century the propaganda has 
been carried forward. By sermons, episcopal charges, 
addresses, tracts, periodicals, it has been dinned into 
the people's ears that the Church ought to be free, 
that to make any financial condition of attendance is 
wrong, selfish, anti-Christian. Is it any wonder that 
the .people have come to believe what they have been 
so diligently taught ? Is it surprising if they better 
their instruction ? I would have it understood that I 
am not making an argument for pewed churches. 
The antithesis of the " free church " is not " the pew 
church," it is any church wherein the attendant has 
the amount which he shall pay for his place fixed for 
him by the Church, and not left to his own whim from 
day to day. It is probably true that there are few 
really free churches — that is, churches which actually 
depend upon the free-will offerings of the people at 
the services. But that is not the point. The point is 
that there are hundreds in which that is held before 
the people as the ideal of A\ r hat ought of right to be. 
This is where the mischief is done. It is not that a 



48 CHURCH AND CLERGY 

free church here and there gives its priest a meagre sup- 
port and can rarely spare an offertory for any object 
outside itself. It is that the people have their sense of 
responsibility debauched by the display of a false ideal. 
From the organization of the American Church up 
to about twenty-five years ago, the missions started 
almost invariably passed on, and passed on quickly to 
become self-supporting parishes. A group of Church 
people in a new town, or in a new portion of a city, 
drew together, grew larger, built a church for them- 
selves, called a minister for themselves, and paid 
for all themselves. When I say built a church for 
themselves, I mean that. They were the owners, and 
being the owners they could exercise hospitality. But 
the visitor came within their gates as a visitor, and 
not as one who, they feared, might rebuke them for 
not waiving their own rights and declaring the house 
free alike to all. But the simple fact is, that while 
this way prevailed the Church did grow, it organized 
new parishes, they became self-sustaining, and they 
paid their clergy. Why is it that so many scores of 
missions and parishes, started within the last quarter 
century, remain a burden on the Church at large ? In 
multitudes of towns and cities the conditions have been 
far more favorable than were the early conditions of 
the parishes which are now called upon to help them. 
I believe that one will go far to explain the evils of 
the present situation when he says that there has 
spread abroad a well-meant but mischievous spirit of 



CHURCH AND CLERGY 49 

ecclesiastical communism which bids fair to convert 
the churches of this land into sturdy beggars. It is 
paralyzing the efforts of the bishops, it is starving the 
clergy and deteriorating the manly fibre of the laity. 

And now, things being as they are, might it not be 
wisest to look for relief to a celibate clergy? That 
this idea is in the minds of many of the bishops is 
evident from their replies. They are practical men 
and are confronted with immediate necessities. It 
should not be surprising if they snatch at the relief 
which seems to lie nearest to hand. Certainly an un- 
married man can live upon less than can a family. 
He can go where he is sent. He is more amenable to 
discipline. These two considerations, a clergy more 
easily maintained, and the bishop's desire to possess 
the " power of mission," lead not a few of our bishops 
(themselves having families) to look in this direction, 
and lead a few of them to advocate that way. 

They had better first count the cost. A celibate 
clergy is an institution of quite incalculable potency. 
It is the one thing which gives the Koman Church its 
power. Change that, and the Koman Church would 
fall to pieces. There is an army of loose-footed janis- 
saries who can never fix themselves by bonds of com- 
mon life and affection at any point in human society. 
They are, therefore, always to be depended upon to 
carry out the will of their superiors. But the hu- 
man soul cannot live without affection. The celibate 
priest among us (I do not mean the unmarried priest,) 



50 CHURCH AND CLERGY 

gives his heart to his Order. It is true that he will 
obey his bishop, provided his bishop be one of his own 
kind, and provided farther that there be round about 
him a discipline vigorous enough to protect the celi- 
bate from himself and to protect the Church from 
complicity with him in his faults. If the Church 
should determine soberly that a celibate clergy is the 
practical answer to a practical problem, and should 
adopt the system together with the discipline neces- 
sary to safeguard it, the most that could be said would 
be that this Church would then be transformed into 
something quite unlike to what it is now and ever has 
been. A different kind of men would fill her ministry, 
and the kind of laymen we have known heretofore 
would disappear from her. Still, the new institution 
might remain respectable. 

But if, on the other hand, celibacy shall, unnoticed 
and unregulated, come to prevail without that stern 
discipline which in Rome avails at least to maintain 
outward decency, then, and in that case, the clergy 
and the laity of the type which have borne the 
Church's fortunes thus far may quietly prepare for re- 
moval from an institution which should have so far 
transformed itself that they could no longer recognize 
it, or safely remain within it. 

In any case, it may be well to be reminded that the 
" Power of Mission," of which some bishops are dream- 
ing, is quite impossible. Beside the fact that it is not 
Catholic, nor primitive, nor American, and beside the 



CHURCH AND CLERGY 51 

i 

fact that neither clergy nor laity either would or 
ought to submit to it, and beside the fact that many- 
bishops are utterly unfit to exercise it, this Church of 
ours is barred from adopting it by the law of honor 
and good faith. Among the list of "Fundamental 
Eights and Liberties," unanimously accepted as the 
basis upon which the Convention which framed the 
Constitution should act, is the provision that the ap- 
pointment of clergy to cures should always rest with 
the laity. For this Church that matter is settled, until 
and unless she should be willing to break pledged faith. 

But what, then ? Here there are but two places in 
the United States at this moment open for a man who 
cannot live upon less than a thousand dollars a year 
and a rectory, while more than one-half of our clergy 
receive less than that. What shall we do ? 

I reply, first, realize the fact. Second, seek for the 
cause. Third, let candidates for Orders kuow the 
facts. This will be a fan to winnow them. Those 
who are conscious of possessing the strength and 
enthusiasm to go out and make a place, each man for 
himself, will go, and will bless and be blessed. 

Nor need we pass over silently the petition, " Send 
forth laborers into Thy harvest." " Laborers " and 
" clergy " are not synonymous. There be laborers 
who are not clergymen ; and there be clergymen, I 
trow, who are not laborers. Multitudes of laborers 
are needed in every nook and corner of the vineyard, 
but they need not be ordained. 



ABOUT THEOLOGICAL SEMINARIES 



Ill 

ABOUT THEOLOGICAL SEMINAKIES 

If we were altogether without any system of theo- 
logical education, it would probably not be difficult 
for wise men to put their heads together and arrange 
one which would be satisfactory. Unfortunately, 
however, we have one already occupying the ground, 
but one which is confessed on all hands not to be 
what we would be glad to have it. I do not think I 
have ever heard any clergyman speak with entire con- 
tentment of our system of theological training. Nor 
have I ever found one who has looked back upon his 
own course in the seminary with the same satisfaction 
with which he looks back upon his course in the uni- 
versity, or with which the lawyer or the doctor or the 
engineer looks back upon his years in his professional 
school. I therefore venture to criticise our present 
system, because while I recognize distinctly that it 
has in it many elements of good, and that there are 
connected with it scholars and devoted men at whose 
feet I am not worthy to sit, nevertheless, I think it is 
well that men should speak out frankly the things 
which they think, and so give an opportunity to other 
men who think differently to say their say with equal 
plainness. 

55 



56 ABOUT THEOLOGICAL SEMINARIES 

The charges which I venture to bring against our 
present system of training men for the ministry are, 
first, that it does not tend to secure the right kind of 
men; second, that it does not train them efficiently 
for the purpose they have in view ; third, that it costs 
far too much money. 

In looking about for the explanation of these evils, 
which are, at least in part, acknowledged by every 
one, the root of the matter would seem to be in the 
fact of our general confusion as to precisely what the 
ministry is. The Church, in the nature of the case, 
can never prepare any man for the ministry unless 
she have in mind precisely what the nature of the of- 
fice and work is for which she is trying to fit him. 
What, then, are we attempting to produce in our 
theological seminaries ? Is it masters of ritual cere- 
monial? is it directors of men's consciences? is it 
forceful advocates ? is it skillful executives ? or is it a 
combination of all of these ? It will be readily seen 
that the method of training which would secure one 
of these results is a method which cannot by any 
possibility produce the others. 

Now, to clear the ground here, let us look back to 
the beginning and see what the idea of the ministry 
was which was practically accepted and acted upon in 
the earliest days of the Church. It is evident at a 
glance that all those purposes named above, if they 
were present at all in the minds of the earliest apos- 
tles, were present only as subsidiary to another pur- 



ABOUT THEOLOGICAL SEMINAKIES , 57 

pose which was to be reached in a different way. 
The earliest ministers of Christ regarded themselves 
as the bearers of a very plain and simple message : it 
was the declaration of the fact of the Cross of Christ 
as a method of living, and of the Resurrection as a 
new motive for right living. The men themselves 
were all men without special training as priests, dea- 
cons, pastors, or executives. It is a very significant 
fact that from the " multitudes of priests " (and we 
may ■ add scribes also) " who were added to the 
Church " not a single one appears to have entered its 
ministry. Their previous training and qualification 
for official work in an ecclesiastical organization seem 
all to have gone for nothing, and a different kind of 
men were selected, with different qualifications. And 
we may say, in passing, that the success of the early 
preachers of the gospel and administrators of the 
Church was at least fairly good. 

When we pass from the earliest days of the Church 
into its patristic period, we find that exactly the same 
ideas prevailed concerning the preparation for the 
ministry. Justin Martyr, for example, was an Ori- 
ental Greek philosopher, and he passed at once from 
his professional work to the work of the ministry. 
Of the early education of Irenseus nothing is known. 
Cyprian was an educated Latin gentleman, knowing 
no tongue but his own, and with no previous training 
in technical theology. Origen was a lecturer of 
theology at the age of eighteen; and when in later 



58 ABOUT THEOLOGICAL SEMINARIES 

years he did subject himself to a regular course of 
theological training, he unfortunately became a here- 
tic. Athanasius had a common school education, and 
learned his theology himself. Gregory Nazianzen 
had established his reputation as a grammarian, 
mathematician, and rhetorician, and passed from that 
at once into the ministry. Jerome prepared himself 
by the study of the pagan Greek and Roman classics. 
Basil was a professional philosopher, Augustine a 
professional rhetorician. Ambrose was a lawyer, 
made a bishop eight days after he was baptized. 
The only one among them all who seems to have had 
a careful scientific theological training before be- 
ginning his ministry was Arius ! 

This general ideal of the preparation for the min- 
istry passed on into the Middle Ages. Alcuin was a 
classicist. Anselm was a merchant ; Bernard had the 
training of a knight and a noble. Thomas Aquinas' 
preparatory studies were in Aristotle and Dionysius 
the Areopagite. Calvin was a lawyer. 

Among the masters of English theology the same 
idea of preparation prevailed. Bishop Barrow was a 
professor of Greek and mathematics, up to the time 
of his ordination. Bishop Andrews was master of 
Pembroke Hall, Cambridge. Jeremy Taylor won his 
fellowship in the classics. And so generally. 

When one looks for the reason of the wonderful 
efficiency of the men whose names occur in this long 
roll of apostles, fathers, and theologians, two or three 



ABOUT THEOLOGICAL SEMINARIES 59 



explanations occur. The first and most evident one 
is that their " vocation " to the ministry came to them 
in every case when they were full-grown men, with 
the knowledge of life and men, and with the oppor- 
tunity to accurately estimate their own powers. 
They left their nets, their counting houses their 
schools, — in which they had already attained success, 
— and became the ambassadors of Jesus Christ. 

The second is that they proceeded at once to use the 
faculties and qualifications which they had already 
possessed and had tried and tested in the actual con- 
duct of their lives. 

The third is that they were chosen and called by the 
bishops and the congregations, and were not volun- 
teers. 

Now, it is but fair to say that the operation of that 
law which Mr. Spencer calls the "differentiation of 
function " has had its place in the Church as well as in 
society and in the physical world. To a certain point 
the legitimate operation of this law upon the prepara- 
tion of men for the ministry of the Church must be 
allowed. But our contention is that it has been per- 
mitted to operate to an extent which has practically 
reversed or destroyed some of the fundamental princi- 
ples upon which the choice of men for the ministry 
and their preparation therefor should proceed. 

First of all, as things are with us, any man who ex- 
pects to be ordained priest at twenty-four must settle 
his vocation not later than at the age of nineteen ; in 



60 ABOUT THEOLOGICAL SEMINAKIES 

other words, he must determine while he is yet a boy 
whether or not he intends as a man to devote his life 
to the ministry. This is the necessary condition of 
things, of course, in every other profession. The de- 
mands of each profession have become so exacting that 
the technical training therefor has been greatly 
lengthened out ; so that any man who wishes to enter 
the profession must determine upon it a long while in 
advance. But the ministry will not stand upon the 
ground of a " profession." It is not a profession : it is 
a vocation. The whole theory of the Church is that 
this vocation comes to a man when he is a man, and 
comes to him with such imperious command that he 
dare not refuse it. With us ninety-nine per cent, of 
Christian men are practically forbidden to obey this 
vocation. Not long ago one of the most eloquent and 
devoted of our bishops made an address in my church 
upon Domestic Missions. He closed with an impress- 
ive appeal to the men present, by their love of God 
and of their country, to consider whether they might 
not, — some of them at any rate, — like St. Matthew, 
leave their counting houses and become ambassadors 
of Christ. Now, suppose one of these men had taken 
the bishop at his word. He is a lawyer, a merchant, 
an engineer, an architect, a man of affairs, or a man of 
leisure. His standing in the community is high. He 
has shown by his success in business his ability to deal 
with men and things. By his offer of himself he shows 
his devotion. He is thirty-five years old and has a 



ABOUT THEOLOGICAL SEMINARIES 61 

/ 

family which he rules well. The Church is praying : 
" Lord, send forth laborers into Thy harvest." Here is 
a laborer ready. He offers himself. "What does the 
Church say to him ? She says : My dear brother, it 
will take you four years, at least, to be able to pass 
the Standing Committee. It is enough for him. And 
it ought to be enough. He turns away ; and the 
Church goes again upon her knees, and wails in solemn 
litany : " Lord, send forth laborers into Thy harvest." 

Then you can, if you will, set over against this the 
fact that four hundred priests, who possess precisely 
the learning in which our friend who sadly turns away 
is wanting, are "unemployed" and can hardly get 
their bread. 

The explanation of all this is that, while we rightly 
insist upon having " educated " men in the ministry, 
we insist upon an artificial kind of education. Even 
as late as fifty years ago the phrase " an educated 
man " was one which was perfectly well understood. 
It meant, with us, a man who had gone through col- 
lege, studied Greek, Latin, mathematics, natural philos- 
ophy, and the humanities. But since that time the 
majority of educated men have not been trained along 
these, but upon different lines. We continue to insist, 
however, that for our purpose no man is an educated 
man unless his education has been of this kind arbi- 
trarily decreed. 

Side by side with this is the fact that the person 
whose natural and inalienable right it is to make choice 



62 ABOUT THEOLOGICAL SEMINARIES 

of fit men for the ministry has had his rights taken 
from him and usurped by another power. Nowhere 
else in the whole Church Catholic is the right of the 
bishop to choose out fit persons for the ministry and 
to pass upon their qualifications questioned. In our 
American Church this power has been practically taken 
from him and lodged in the hands of the Standing Com- 
mittee. In the whole transaction neither the bishop, 
who should select, nor the congregation, who should 
choose out, has any power. It is a matter between the 
candidate for Orders and the Standing Committee. 

Lest this assertion may be called in question, I ven- 
ture to condense from Title I. of the Digest precisely 
what is the manner of procedure. When a man thinks 
of " studying for the ministry," he is first directed to 
consult his rector. If the rector thinks well of it, he 
can go to the bishop. If the rector does not think 
well of it, he can go to the bishop all the same. Upon 
his arrival, the bishop is instructed to ask him, first, 
whether he has ever applied elsewhere ; second, whether 
he is ready to pass his examinations ; third, when and 
where he was baptized, confirmed, and received his 
first communion. If he is able to answer all these 
inquiries satisfactorily, the bishop is canonically re- 
quired — to make a note of it. That is all. At 
this stage the canons declare that in the absence of a 
bishop the Standing Committee can do it all just as 
well. But now the real business of the young man 
commences. The bishop may know him, and love 



ABOUT THEOLOGICAL SEMINARIES 63 

j 

him, and be fain to ordain him, but that goes for noth- 
ing. He must now " apply to the Standing Commit- 
tee for recommendation to the bishop for admission as 
a candidate." He must bring to the Standing Com- 
mittee a " testimonial." If he does not bring this tes- 
timonial, however, the canon is careful to say that the 
Standing Committee can receive him all the same. 
With the recommendation of the Standing Committee 
in his hand the young man goes again to the bishop. 
The canon evidently assumes that the bishop will obey 
the godly admonition of the Standing Committee in 
the premises, for at this point it declares that the 
bishop shall require the young man to declare whether 
he intends to become a candidate for priest's Orders 
or for deacon's Orders only. If the latter, the 
bishop may now accept him. If the former, the 
bishop may not yet be trusted. He must now 
inquire for the young man's diploma. If there is 
any doubt as to its sufficiency, the bishop is advised 
to submit it to the Standing Committee for their 
consideration. If no diploma is forthcoming, the 
young man must be turned over to the examining 
chaplains. After all this the bishop may — not ordain 
him, but admit him to be a candidate for ordination 
at some future time. 

The primitive and Catholic theory is that the bishop 
in his quality of chief pastor shall be able to know 
who are fit persons to enter the ministry ; and that in 
the determination of this question, he shall cooperate 



64 ABOUT THEOLOGICAL SEMINAKIES 

with the congregation who personally know the man. 
The organizing principle about which our Church re- 
volves is the episcopate ; and the one peculiar power 
of the episcopate is the power of ordination. For this 
we believe that office has a divine sanction. To insist, 
therefore, that the bishop shall be forbidden to exer- 
cise the one function which is peculiar to him, without 
the consent and recommendation of another power un- 
known both to the primitive and to the Catholic 
Church, is simply a solemn trifling, which the world 
will sooner or later find out. May we not hope that 
the bishops may some time pluck up the courage to 
resist that steady encroachment upon their inherent 
prerogatives which has marked the action of that 
house of clerical and lay deputies which now for some 
time has strangely fancied that it is the Church ? 

Another charge which may fairly be brought against 
our present method is that it is inefficient even within 
the arbitrary, artificial lines which it has set. There 
are very few young men to whom it is possible to 
secure a first-rate, or even a second-rate, university 
education in the department of the humanities, and 
still have the time and the money to spare for a three- 
years' theological course. It is true that a large num- 
ber of our theological students write A. B. after their 
names. From an examination of the catalogues of a 
dozen of our seminaries I should think that about fifty 
per cent, have the right to do so. A little closer ex- 
amination, however, will discover the fact that these 



ABOUT THEOLOGICAL SEMINARIES I 65 

bachelors' degrees have been conferred in large num- 
ber by small, ill-equipped, and unsatisfactory colleges, 
which have arisen for the express purpose of provid- 
ing a short, cheap, and inadequate college training for 
candidates for the ministry. I have no fault to find 
with these colleges or with the spirit in which they 
conduct their work. As things are with us, they 
would seem to be a necessity. The time and expense 
necessary for education in a first-rate college or uni- 
versity are beyond the unaided means of most candi- 
dates for the ministry. If the Church, therefore, in- 
sists that they shall have in advance a particular kind 
of education, and will accept no other kind, it is but 
natural and proper that she should provide the ma- 
chinery to give them this education. But the Church 
should not allow herself to be deceived any more than 
the world at large is actually deceived with regard to 
the matter. The educated world is not deceived at 
all ; it knows exactly what this collegiate education is 
worth and what it is not. It may be alleged, without 
much fear of contradiction, that the work done within 
our theological seminaries themselves does not compare 
in earnestness or efficiency with the work done in the 
technical schools where men are being fitted for other 
professions. In preparing this paper I have had be- 
fore me the rosters for the middle year of students 
in probably our best divinity school, an average medi- 
cal school, and an average law school. In the medical 
school the lectures which the students of that year 



W ABOUT THEOLOGICAL SEMINARIES 

are bound to attend take twenty-seven hours a week. 
These lectures are upon the most exact subjects, which 
require the utmost precision and accuracy of work. 
In addition to these twenty-seven hours required at 
least six more hours are bound to be spent in dis- 
section and at clinics. The authorities of the school 
are bowelless. The student must do his work and pass 
his examinations without any regard to his attractive 
or unattractive personal qualities, or he cannot re- 
ceive his diploma. In the corresponding law school 
the roster shows a requirement of twenty-nine hours a 
week at lectures ; and the dean of the school informs 
me that it is not possible for any student to pass his 
final examinations and receive his degree unless he 
adds to this at least ten hours a week. In both these 
schools, — as I have had the opportunity personally to 
observe, — the student is compelled to work, work, 
work ; and his final passage depends upon whether he 
actually has or has not done the work. In the corre- 
sponding divinity school the second-year men are 
called upon to attend seventeen hours of lectures. 
The studies with which they are engaged are not 
studies of precision. It depends upon the student 
himself largely as to how much or how little work he 
shall perform. I am constrained to believe that he 
works not much more than half as many hours during 
his year as the student in either of these other schools, 
and that his work is done with less than half the ac- 
curacy and thoroughness. 



ABOUT THEOLOGICAL SEMINARIES i 67 

The only consoling reflection at this stage is that 
when one looks over the course of study set before the 
student in some of our seminaries it is just as well that 
he does not spend too much time upon it. For example, 
in one of our most widely known schools the text- 
books in dogmatic theology for two whole years are 
Pearson on the Creed, Percival's " Digest of Theol- 
ogy," and Butler's "Analogy"; and for collateral 
illumination the students are directed to the 
" Summa " of St. Thomas, St. Leo on the Incarnation, 
the " Catechetical Lectures " of St. Cyril of Jerusalem, 
McLaren's " Catholic Dogma the Antidote of Doubt " ; 
and the only book upon evidences is Pa-ley's ! It is as 
though the students at West Point should be loosely 
trained in the use of crossbows and jingalls, and then 
commissioned as officers in the United States Army ! 

But with the requirements being even what they 
are, it is practically impossible for the great majority 
of our theological students to provide for themselves 
the expense which it entails. If, however, we accept 
the decision of a boy of nineteen that he shall pre- 
pare himself, or be prepared, for ordination to the 
ministry according to the requirements which the 
Church establishes, it is but fair and right, from his 
point of view, that the Church should provide for him 
those means which it forbids him the opportunity to 
earn for himself. Xo theological student, therefore, 
need feel shame or humiliation in being aided by the 
Church w T hile he is pursuing his studies. But as to the 



68 ABOUT THEOLOGICAL SEMLNAKIES 

effect of this assistance upon those who receive it, the 
opinion of thoughtful and candid men is that, upon the 
whole, it is bad. That, however, is a subject too 
delicate to be entered upon here. 

Another charge which may be brought against our 
system is that it is disgracefully expensive. Our 
"plant" for the education of the theological students 
as compared with that for the education of lawyers or 
doctors or even engineers is at least four times greater 
in money value in proportion to the number of men 
being trained by it. At a rough guess the property 
of our eighteen theological seminaries may be put at 
$6,000,000. There are in those seminaries about three 
hundred students. At five per cent, upon the capital 
invested, therefore, the cost to the Church annually 
for the education of each student is $1,000. To this is 
to be added the whole expense for the livelihood of 
the student while in the seminary and the support of 
the teachers who teach him. In those eighteen semi- 
naries the faculties, not counting the bishops, include 
sixty-nine priests. Their support and salaries must be 
added. There are about three and one quarter stu- 
dents to each professor. At the lowest calculation 
upon this basis, it costs the Church $2,000 a year for 
the education of each student. This is at least double 
the cost for the education of students for other pro- 
fessions. 

Now, it ought to go without saying that there are 
in our seminaries teachers, not a few, the peers of any 



ABOUT THEOLOGICAL SEMINABIES / 69 

teachers in any department of learning. There are 
students as diligent and efficient and as capable as the 
students in any other kind of institution of learning. 
Everybody knows that this is true. But everybody 
knows, or at least may know if he takes the trouble 
to inquire, that, speaking generally, the facts of the 
situation are as I have tried to set them forth. 

What, then, has caused this unfortunate condition 
of affairs, and what can be done by the Church to re- 
form it ? 

The first cause would seem to be that we insist upon 
an " educated " ministry without having clear notions 
as to what kind of education is really the kind which 
will produce the purpose we have in view. We have 
insisted as essential that the preliminary education 
shall include Latin and Greek and Hebrew. It is true 
that there are provisions for exemptions in certain 
cases from each of these ; but the simple fact that a 
dispensation is required in any case is the proof that 
in general the requirement is fixed. Now, it has 
come about that the great majority of educated men 
do not know Latin or Greek, to say nothing of He- 
brew. In any large university (the technical schools 
being included in the university) it will be found that 
the academic department is far smaller numerically 
than the other departments. Even within the aca- 
demic department there are elective courses which do 
not include Latin or Greek and hardly ever include 
Hebrew. Are the men who pass through these uni- 



70 ABOUT THEOLOGICAL SEMINARIES 

versity courses educated men or are they not ? They 
are clearly so for every purpose except the ministry. 
What is the explanation, then, of the fact that we in- 
sist upon a knowledge of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew 
as conditions precedent for the study of theology. 
The explanation is twofold. First, it is a survival 
from a previous condition of affairs where this particu- 
lar kind of knowledge was the badge of an educated 
man. In the second place, it is the unconscious in- 
fluence of a theory concerning the place of the Holy 
Scriptures in the Christian economy which this Church 
of ours does not hold. Within Protestantism gener- 
ally it is assumed that the Bible is the sole rule of 
faith and practice. If this be true, then any man who 
proposes to be a public teacher of Christianity must 
be familiar most intimately with the authority. For 
such a man the authority in its English guise is not 
sufficient. He must be able himself to determine pre- 
cisely what the Holy Scriptures say and do not say 
upon any question ; and this knowledge he can only 
obtain for himself by being able to critically examine 
the original. This theory of the place of the Holy 
Scriptures the Catholic Church has never held and our 
Church does not hold. Nevertheless, its influence has 
obtained so widely that it has affected our practical 
methods even though we disavow the theory itself. I 
venture to say that the efficiency of the ordinary 
Christian minister at the end of the nineteenth cen- 
tury depends hardly at all upon his knowledge of 



ABOUT THEOLOGICAL SEMINARIES ( 71 

either Greek, Latin, or Hebrew ; and it is well that it 
does not, for in the vast majority of instances he does 
not possess this knowledge, and could not possess it to 
the necessary degree even if he tried. Where any 
question of Christian doctrine hinges upon a critical 
interpretation of the text, it is necessary to call in the 
services of an expert. Scholarship has become alto- 
gether too accurate and its demands too exigent to be 
met and satisfied by amateurs. 

But do not misunderstand me. No Church can sur- 
vive for any great length of time whose ministry does 
not contain within it the very highest and best scholar- 
ship. But it does not at all follow that that scholar- 
ship should be equally distributed throughout the 
whole ministry. The Roman priesthood, — whose 
efficiency no one will question, whatever he may think 
of the end toward which this efficiency is directed, — 
contains within it scholarship of the very highest 
order ; but the priests who serve the Church in the 
field of scholarship are not the same ones who serve 
it in the field of its practical work. Our mistake, as 
it seems to me, has been to insist that we should all 
alike possess the same qualifications of scholarship. 
The result has been that we leave our scholars no op- 
portunity for the perfection of their work ; and the 
rest of us try to persuade ourselves that we are 
scholars, when in point of fact we are not. 

Now, in the face of all this, I venture to deliberately 
express the opinion that for the ordinary Christian 



72 ABOUT THEOLOGICAL SEMINAKIES 

minister but little special theological training is need- 
ful. If we shall be able to recover the lost fact that 
the ministry is intended to be recruited by men who 
enter it in response to a vocation, and not from hoys 
who are artificially selected and especially trained, 
the reason of this will become evident. If a mature 
man who has been reared in a Christian community, 
within a Christian Church, in a Christian family, has 
obeyed his baptismal admonition to hear sermons all 
his life long, does not then know what Christianity is, 
we may fairly assume that he never will know. The 
prerequisite knowledge for the ministry is of quite a 
different kind. The gospel is not abstruse ; it is per- 
fectly simple. If it had been so complex and difficult 
of comprehension, and difficult of accurate statement, 
as is often now assumed, it never could have made it- 
self intelligible to the world. What is needed is 
a knowledge not of the seed, but of the field. As a 
seed of course it shares in the mystery which belongs 
to all seeds and to all vital processes. But those mys- 
teries are, in the nature of the case, as insoluble to a 
trained theologian as they are to your average Chris- 
tian. But it is absolutely necessary that the sower 
who undertakes to plant the seed should be in posses- 
sion of at least such knowledge of the actual con- 
dition of the soil, surroundings, climate, seasons, and 
temperature as it is possible for him to obtain. 

Practically, therefore, the line of procedure would 
seem to be to shorten the time which is expended 



ABOUT THEOLOGICAL SEMINAKIES 73 

upon technical theological training and greatly extend 
the period of study in secular knowledge. The man 
who enters the ministry should know something, at 
any rate, of at least some department of human life, 
whether it be business, letters, society, commerce, or 
what not. He will be able to exercise his gifts as a 
minister to advantage only in those surroundings 
which he himself understands. But this kind of 
knowledge is not obtainable in a theological seminary. 
If a boy settles his vocation at nineteen and passes 
through a Church college and immediately enters the 
theological seminary, emerging therefrom at twenty- 
three or twenty -four, this kind of knowledge he will be 
compelled to attain after he has entered the ministry. 
He will attain it then, if ever, under the greatest pos- 
sible difficulties, because whole fields of life which 
under other conditions would be open to him for ex- 
ploration he will find closed. 

It is very seriously to be doubted whether the now 
practically universal custom of preparing all our can- 
didates for the ministry in seminaries has not been, 
upon the whole, a serious detriment to the efficiency 
of the ministry. I am inclined to think that, upon the 
whole, it was more influential before there were any 
theological seminaries. It must be remembered that 
the seminary itself is quite a modern invention. In 
our own Church in America it only reaches back to 
1825, and in the Church of England no further than 
to 1860. Previous to that time, and outside of that 



74 ABOUT THEOLOGICAL SEMINARIES 

custom, the bishop received or declined to receive the 
men who came to him as a postulant. The bishop's 
judgment hinged upon the man's general learning and 
capacity. If he were received at all, he was ordained 
to the diaconate almost at once. During his diaconate 
he learned the practical work of the ministry under 
the direction of some mature and judicious priest. If 
he became a specialist in any department of theolog- 
ical learning, he took up that specialty later on. 

My own opinion is that our own ministry would be 
benefited in the future by closing the doors at once of 
fifteen from among our eighteen seminaries. If the en- 
dowment and equipment of those closed could be 
added to the three which might remain, and if from the 
teaching corps now busy in them all could be culled a 
sufficient number of men to teach those in the re- 
maining three far beyond that which they are now 
taught, we would be likely to have within our 
ministry a learning which we do not now possess. 
We would then have a learned ministry to do those 
things within the Church which it is the scholar's 
function to do. "We would also have a practical 
ministry to do those things in the Church for which 
high scholarship is not an equipment, but is really a 
hindrance. We would thus be following in the line 
of apostolic and Catholic custom, and we would have 
the right to expect that efficiency and success which 
God vouchsafes to His Church while the Church fol- 
lows along the lines of God's methods. 



BKOAD CHUKCHME]S T , AND NARROW 



IV 

BEOAD CHUECHMEN, AND NAEEOW 

Me. Balfoue in his late very remarkable book 
has, if not for the first time, at any rate with unprec- 
edented clearness, pointed out the double function 
which creeds play in the religious economy. In the 
first place they are formulations of truth ; and in the 
second place they serve as the platforms around 
which societies are organized. To be more specific : 
the propositions of the Council of Trent, the XXXIX. 
Articles and the Westminster Confession were each 
and all drawn up originally with the single purpose of 
expressing accurately and sufficiently the contents of 
the Christian Truth. In each case the organization 
which thus expressed its mind was already in ex- 
istence and strong in its self-consciousness. In each 
case the organization honestly tried to state the truth 
as it saw the truth. But the instant such a formulary 
had been promulgated and had been accepted by the 
mind of the church, its intrinsic value as a statement 
of the Truth of Christ began to wane, and it began to 
be thought of as the symbol, the badge, the banner, 
the platform of a society. Before formulation its 
terms were things to be sought for diligently and 
humbly. After formulation the same terms became 

77 



78 BROAD CHURCHMEN, AND NARROW 

things to be fought for to be maintained against all 
comers, to suffer martyrdom for, and to persecute for. 
Year by year and generation by generation there 
gathered about each venerable symbol a mass of 
sentiment, devotion, reverence and sense of " loyalty " 
which resents any suggestion of modification. Thus 
the symbols which were originally the product of an 
open-minded search for truth have come to be the 
jealously guarded possession of a conservatism which 
takes no account of truth. 

Such is the situation to-day. The problem is : How 
to procure the restatement of those phases of the 
truth of Christ which it has been discovered that the 
formularies stated wrongly, and to do this in the face 
of that unreasoning and jealous " loyalty " to the for- 
mularies considered as banners of a society. The 
problem takes different forms in different churches, 
but it is substantially the same everywhere. In the 
church of Rome, for example, there is really but one 
article of faith, that is to say, the principle of the 
authority of the Church. Tens of thousands of lib- 
eral Catholics question its truth, but the great ma- 
jority maintain it because of their devotion to the 
organization. Among the Congregationalists the 
controversy has raged about an abstract doctrine or 
hypothesis concerning the future life. One class of 
men, following moral analogy and logical necessity, 
have announced their belief in a probation which does 
not close when life ends, but is continued beyond the 



BROAD CHURCHMEN, AND NARROW 79 

grave. Another and probably larger class oppose 
this, not because it is unreasonable, but because it is 
contrary to the accepted doctrine. In the Presby- 
terian church the battle rages. One class asks con- 
cerning certain matters, " What is true ? " Another 
and far larger number asks, " What do the standards 
of the church say ? " And now the storm-centre 
seems about to shift itself to the Protestant Episcopal 
church. What form will it there assume ? 

Before proceeding to reply to that question it may 
be well to point out why it is that this sort of diffi- 
culty has arisen all around just now, rather than fifty 
or a hundred years ago ? The explanation is very sim- 
ple. From the time the fathers fell asleep all things 
continued as they were until about the middle of the 
present century. Since that time more and greater 
changes have occurred in the actual conditions of hu- 
man life than in the two thousand years which pre- 
ceded. We are literally living in a New World. It 
is precisely true to say that if an educated man who 
died in 1850 were to revisit the earth to-day great 
areas of its thought, its customs, its language, would 
be unintelligible to him. He would find whole 
libraries in the physical sciences written in English, 
but which would be to him but jargon. In philoso- 
phy he would discover that what he had regarded as 
postulates have been dismissed as illegitimate deduc- 
tions. So the necessity has arisen to examine the 
formularies of religious doctrine in the light of the 



80 

truth which shines to-day. The proposal to do so is 
sternly forbidden for fear it may damage the organi- 
zations which have grouped themselves about these 
formularies. 

In the Episcopal church the men who ask " What is 
true ? " have been denominated " Broad Churchmen." 
Those who ask " What is proper for us to believe ? " 
have been classed under various terms. But if the 
two classes have been isolated and described in the 
Episcopal church alone it is not because the distinc- 
tion exists there alone. It underlies all denominational 
distinctions. The truth is there are only two kinds of 
churchmen possible, Broad and Narrow. These two 
divisions exhaust the subject. Those who dislike for 
any reason to be called " broad," and prefer to label 
themselves " high " or "low," simply hide their heads 
in the sand. The antithesis of Broad is Narrow, and 
so it will remain. 

Is there likely to be a lining up on either side of this 
distinction ? If so, just what form is the contest 
likely to take ? and what is likely to be the effect 
upon the Episcopal church ? 

A thing which attracted much attention in this 
direction was the promulgation a few years ago by 
the bishops of the Protestant Episcopal church of a 
letter in which they defined the doctrines of the In- 
carnation and of Inspiration. They premised that 
they did so because they had reason to believe that 
these doctrines are widely questioned within the 



81 

church. They did not enter upon any attempt to 
show the intrinsic truth of the two doctrines, but only 
to point out that they have been received, and that 
this church has in no wise ceased to demand subscrip- 
tion thereto. Of course this deliverance of the bishops 
had no ecclesiastical authority, not having been put 
forth by the House of Bishops in their official ca- 
pacity ; nevertheless, any deliverance of the bishops 
carries with it great weight and influence. By not a 
few it was deemed an end to controversy upon the 
subject-matter with which it deals. But it is well to 
ask, how did it come to be issued ? It is of the nature 
of an open secret that it was set forth at the urgent 
instance of two bishops above all other men. The 
significant thing is that one of them, the Bishop of 
Springfield, would probably be ranked as the 
"highest," and the other, the Bishop of Western 
Michigan, as the " lowest " on the bench. What drew 
these brethren into such unity upon this point ? The 
answer is, in tjie one case it Avas apprehension about 
the integrity and symmetry of the ecclesiastical or- 
ganization ; in the other case it was apprehension 
about the integrity and symmetry of a system of 
theology. It has chanced that the shifting of time 
has brought two "schools" within the Episcopal 
church to occupy temporarily the same position and 
enter into a tacit league, offensive and defensive, 
against a third " school." The interest of the first is 
Church qua church ; of the second is Doctrine qua doc- 



82 BROAD CHURCHMEN, AND NARROW 



trine ; of the third is Truth qua truth. The league of 
the first two is ill-omened, whether one thinks of the 
future or of the past. As to the future magna est 
Veritas, et prevalebit. If one recalls the past it is dif- 
ficult to repress a smile when one beholds the " Cath- 
olics " posing as the champions of the XXXIX. 
Articles, and the " Evangelicals " standing up for the 
sanctity of the Traditions of the Elders ! 

Nevertheless, these two schools have joined in an ap- 
peal to the Church to speak authoritatively upon the 
question of the nature and obligation of creed-subscrip- 
tion. They have elicited a reply in a formula which 
will live to plague both them and the Episcopate for 
many a day : " Fixedness of interpretation is of the 
essence of the creeds, whether we view them as state- 
ments of fact, or as dogmatic truths founded upon 
and deduced from these facts and once for all deter- 
mined by the operation of the Holy Ghost upon the 
mind of the church " ! It would be difficult to frame 
a more blindly obscurantist phrase. The important 
question for the American Episcopal church, and for 
the public in so far as it is concerned with the church, 
is, Does the temper and sentiment of the phrase above 
quoted express the actual attitude of the clergy and 
people of the church ? It is not easy to answer this 
question. A church does not always know its own 
mind, any more than an individual does. Twenty -five 
years ago, Bishop Colenso was deposed for teaching 
doctrines which are to-day accepted by every bishop 



BROAD CHURCHMEN, AND NARROW 83 

on the bench. Dr. Smith and Dr. Briggs were de- 
posed for teaching doctrines which in twenty years 
more will be accepted without question by the General 
Assembly. This utterance of the bishops has received 
the unqualified indorsement of the denominational 
press of the Episcopal church. It is also accepted by 
very many without thought simply because it is sup- 
posed to be the formal deliverance of the House of 
Bishops. If its opposite had been set forth, these per- 
sons would have accepted that with equal loyalty. It 
is also accepted enthusiastically by the " Catholic " 
party because it appears to indorse their characteristic 
contention as to the " authority " of the church. 
This party, which twenty years ago fought a brave 
battle for toleration and standing ground within the 
church, which they then claimed to be catholic enough 
to embrace all who could say the Apostolic Creeds, 
have dreamed lately of taking possession of the house, 
and making it too strait for the class who were the 
champions of their own liberty at a time when they 
were not able to maintain it themselves. 

One might raise at this point a question of honor 
and gratitude, but it will probably be more to the pur- 
pose to pass to the question, Is the Catholic party 
likely to succeed ? On general principles one would 
say not. The Episcopal church has had rather a long 
histor}^ More than once the attempt has been made 
to narrow it so as to exclude or eject a " school." The 
attempt has never succeeded. Not only has it never 



84 BROAD CHURCHMEN, AND NARROW 

succeeded, but in every case where it has been tried 
the outcome has been to bring forward and give dom- 
inance to the school which it had been proposed to 
crush. In the case before us there are several evident 
reasons why the attempt is foredoomed to failure, and 
this in spite of any temporary advantage which it may 
gain. First of all there is the glaring incongruity be- 
tween the theoretic catholicity and the practical de- 
no minationalism of a party which adopts this policy. 
The people may be let alone to discern this inconsist- 
ency and to deal with it. In the second place, there 
is a reason to which one refers with hesitation. Pos- 
sibly it may be enough to say that with half a dozen 
exceptions neither the men of learning, of influence, of 
reputation nor of ability are to be found in the so- 
called " Catholic " party. It possesses a strong esprit 
die corps and adroit managers, but not many scholars, 
preachers or men who in any way touch the public. 
There are some of the first rank who were at one time 
counted within it, but who have either outgrown it, 
or have been " read out " of it. A party which sys- 
tematically ejects its strongest men would not seem 
to have much hold upon the future. But the third and 
chief reason is that it is part of a movement which has 
passed its period of highest strength. That revival of 
the principle of ecclesiastical authority, which set in, 
in the early years of this century, has moved from 
east to west in much the same manner as a freshet 
moves from north to south down the Mississippi. This 



BEOAD CHTJECHMEJST, Aj^D NAEEOW; 85 

last phenomenon begins by the myriad little streams 
pouring their swollen currents into the head waters of 
the great river. When it is high water at St. Paul the 
river has not yet risen at St. Louis. By the time when 
it is high water at St. Louis the freshet has passed St. 
Paul, and the streams have ceased to feed it. In the 
stream of ecclesiasticism, it was high water at Oxford 
forty years ago. Twenty years ago, the flood was at 
its height at New York and Philadelphia. To-day, the 
height of the freshet is at the longitude of Milwaukee 
and Springfield. It is no longer being fed from the 
original streams. Even its stored-up waters have been 
sluiced off by Dr. Gore and his collaborators into other 
channels. 

Judging from the despondent tones of the leaders 
of the Catholic party, it would appear that they do 
not look to the future with much hope. Says Dr. 
Dix : " The recent startling appearance of pantheistic 
teachers in our church in the person of liberal theolo- 
gians, so called, the open denial of several of the facts 
stated in the creed, the contemptuous repudiation of 
the authority of our church, the substitution of ideas 
derived from the philosophy of evolution for the doc- 
trine of the gospel as this church has received the 
same, and the avowed determination to throw the or- 
dination vow to the winds, and freely to proclaim 
whatever views the individual minister may evolve 
from year to year and from day to day, out of his own 
consciousness, — these signs of the hour increase. It 



86 BROAD CHTJRCHMEK, AND NARROW 

looks as if society was preparing to rise up in general 
revolt against the gospel as we have learned it from 
the Apostles of Jesus Christ and the church which He 
has made the witness and keeper of His revelation. If 
it does, so much the worse for society." Stripped of 
rhetoric, this plaint means that there are men in the 
Episcopal church who categorically deny that " fixed- 
ness of interpretation is of the essence of the creeds ; " 
and that there are so many of them that another class 
has become alarmed, not to say despondent. So there 
are. What, then, is the attitude of " Broad " Church- 
men toward formulated doctrine ? And what do they 
propose to do ? In the first place, they subscribe con 
amove to the Catholic creeds. They recite them in 
public. They teach them in private. But having 
done so, they conceive that they have discharged their 
obligation. They proceed to interpret the articles of 
the creeds in the light of to-day. They do not believe 
that the Holy Spirit has been absent or inert since the 
date of the Council of Nice or Constantinople. They 
believe that Copernicus and Newton and Darwin have 
thrown light upon the complex equations of God and 
man as really as have Athanasius or Thomas Aquinas 
or St. Bernard. They hold it to be disloyalty to God 
to shut their eyes to the light which comes from any 
quarter. If accepting it thankfully means disloyalty 
to the Church, then so much the worse for the Church. 
They think they are most loyal to the Church when 
they are most loyal to its Master. "When they are 



87 

pressed to say whether or not they believe that the 
Faith could endure in case it should appear that any 
particular article of the creed should be shown to be 
contrary to fact, they reply that that is an academic 
question which they do not care to discuss. If they 
are pressed to say whether or not they believe in some 
secondary article of doctrine, such, for example, as 
" Inspiration of Scripture," the propitiatory doctrine of 
the Atonement, or the doctrine of Apostolic Succes- 
sion, they reply that they do not think it worth while 
to answer categorically until they first know more pre- 
cisely what their interrogator means by the terms he 
uses. But they will resist with all their might any 
proposition to make the church more exclusive and 
select by the adoption of more refined and minute 
statements of doctrine. They sincerely believe that 
they are the friends and not the enemies of the church. 
Their apprehension for her is not that she may become 
too loose in her teaching, but that she may be beguiled 
or bullied into taking the dogmatic attitude of a 
sect. 

One thing, however, Broad Churchmen will not do, 
they will not become an organized party. They will 
make no attempt to secure control of the "machine." 
They will do their duty as it is given them to see it, 
each in his own lot. If the machinery of the church 
should ever pass into hands hostile to them, they will 
regret it for their own sakes, but they will regret it 
a thousand times more for the sake of the church. As 



88 BROAD CHURCHMEN, AND NARROW 

to this contingency they are not alarmed. They do 
not think that the church is in peril of committing 
suicide. Suicide it would be, they are persuaded, for 
the church to permit herself to become the narrow, 
petty, unlovely, and impotent thing which ecclesiastics 
and dogmatists would make of her. 



THE NEXT STEP IN CHKISTIANITY 



THE NEXT STEP IN CHRISTIANITY 

Very different notions are entertained by thought- 
ful men about the nature and person of Jesus Christ. It 
is generally agreed, however, that no one will appear 
whose authority could be more trustworthy in the 
sphere of Religion. "What He did not know, in that 
department, is generally conceded to be either not 
worth the knowing, or not possible to be known. It 
is generally conceded, also, that He Himself, and His 
deliverances, have never been more than partially 
comprehended. He declared more than once that 
His nearest and most sympathetic friends did not un- 
derstand Him. It is clear that they did not ; and 
that, in some particulars, they strangely misconceived 
Him. But, all the same, they were deeply impressed 
by Him. The same has been true of "Christendom" 
for now these nearly twenty centuries. He has been 
the most considerable influence which has shaped and 
colored the movement of humanity. He continues to 
be so, as is evident to any one who simply looks 
about him. His name is in point of fact "exalted 
above every name." 

Judging simply from the facts which are equally 
accessible to every one, it seems pretty plain, first, 

91 



92 THE NEXT STEP IN CHRISTIANITY 

that men will not get on without a Religion ; and 
second^ that there is no other Religion available ex- 
cept Christianity. 

A few people, it is true, are experimenting with 
Swedenborgianism, and Compteism, and Buddhism, 
and " Christian Science," but these may be dismissed 
as une quantite negligable. 

From all that one can see, Christianity, in some 
form, is likely to remain the Religion of the enlight- 
ened world. 

Christianity in some form • but in what form ? 

Viewed from the outside, no institution has under- 
gone such startling transformations as has Christianity. 
One who looked at it casually in the first century, say 
at Antioch, and again in the fourth, at Constantinople, 
in the fourteenth in Rome, and in the nineteenth in 
New York, would find great difficulty in identifying 
it. "Will any of these forms be abiding? Or, will 
the Christianity of the future take on an aspect as 
markedly different from any of these as they are from 
each other ? 

I venture to think that this last is true ; and that it 
is a truth the importance of which can hardly be es- 
timated. 

The great metamorphoses which Christianity has 
experienced have not been very many, but they have 
been very marked, and they have each and all been 
characterized by two features : they have been com- 
paratively sudden, and they have not been recognized 



THE NEXT STEP IN CHRISTIANITY ' 93 

by the people who were living when they occurred. 
The phases through which Christianity has passed 
have been substantially these three : viz, the Dog- 
matic, the Ecclesiastical, and the Mystical (or " Evan- 
gelical "). "What will the next one be ? I venture to 
think that it is very near, if not already here, though 
unrecognized. This paper is an attempt to identify 
it in the midst of many phenomena which, without 
the clue, seem meaningless and hopeless. The im- 
portance of doing this, if it can be done, is obvious. 
But, to do so, it will be necessary briefly, to review the 
past. 

It was both inevitable and right that Christianity 
should at first put on a dogmatic dress. The little 
group of men who had been profoundly impressed by 
the person and words of their Judean Master, pro- 
posed to themselves to be missionaries. But this fact 
made it necessary that they should cast, in some port- 
able and transmissible form, their beliefs about the 
person and doctrine of their Principal. This was not 
easily nor readily done. It is clear, from the record, 
that their Master was one of the most perplexing 
characters imaginable. Beside that, the impression 
which He left upon them was the result of years of 
companionship. For them to state clearly just what 
the impression was, was not easy. It did not get it- 
self done completely for several centuries. Much con- 
ferring with one another, and much interchange of 
opinion by converts drawn from different provinces 



94: THE NEXT STEP IN CHRISTIANITY 

were necessary to formulate a working creed. It was 
an absolutely necessary thing to do ; but it was also 
natural that, when the Christian Community had 
been engrossed for three or four centuries in formu- 
lating their belief, they should come into the habit of 
thinking that accurate belief, and an accepted way of 
stating that belief, were the most important of all pos- 
sible things. Christianity came, in their minds, to be 
identified with Doctrine. A large section of Chris- 
tendom stopped at that point, and has ever since re- 
fused to move. The Eastern Church rests in Ortho- 
doxy. She takes that word for her official title. 
And so she sits a spectacle in her Basilica. Old she 
is, but not venerable. Her hair is hoary, but the fire 
of youth is gone from her leaden eyes. Wrapt in her 
embroidered vestments, she slumbers on, as powerless 
to touch or be touched by the life of the men and 
women of Kussia and Greece, as the mummy of Seti 
is that of the Fellahin of Egypt. 

But the Western Church, with its creed in its hand, 
passed on into the next phase. It became a great 
Organization. It inherited the constructive spirit of 
the Great Empire, and bettered its instruction. It 
identified Christianity with a Church. For the first 
four centuries, all revolved about Doctrine. For the 
next ten, all revolved about Organization. Slowly 
and powerfully the structure was builded. ISTo insti- 
tution, probably, has ever been formed of as intract- 
able material, under as unfavorable circumstances, or 



THE NEXT STEP IN CHEISTIANITY , 95 

has commanded the unqualified services of so many- 
generations of astute and earnest men. Within its 
walls, and guarded by its ever watchful sentinels, the 
theological system builders continued to elaborate 
their endless schemes of dogma. They overlaid the 
Missionary Creeds, and buried them out of sight under 
a grotesque mass of derivative doctrines. But it was 
the Churchmen, and not the Theologians, who guided 
the movement of Christianity during this period. 
But, long before the period ended, their task had also 
been completed. The simple missionary Organization, 
which had been necessary to carry the simple Mission- 
ary Creed, was overlaid and buried out of sight in the 
mighty structure of the Boman Church. 

Then came the third phase, known popularly as the 
Reformation. The phrase is misleading. It was not 
a reformation, but a new step. It was the successful 
issue of a long series of efforts, made by the most 
earnest, sagacious, virile and devout men in the West- 
ern Church, to carry their religion from the region of 
dogma and organization into the realm of personal 
experience. Jerome of Prague, Arnold of Brescia, 
Wyckliff, Huss, Luther, Calvin, Colet, More, Cranmer, 
George Fox, Tauler, William Law, John Wesley, all 
sought the same end. In the modern cant they would 
all be called "Evangelicals." The secret spirit which 
they all held in common was the belief that Christian- 
ity is essentially the establishment by the individual 
of a conscious, personal relation with God. This idea 



96 THE NEXT STEP IN CHKISTIANITY 

of " conversion " is the differentiate of Protestantism. 
In American Christianity it has held, nntil lately, the 
central place. 

Now, it will be observed that each of these phases 
is an advance upon the one which preceded it. No 
one of them was possible until the one which went be- 
fore had been measurably accomplished. Each one 
was entered upon unconsciously. Each was strenu- 
ously opposed at its beginning by the mass who 
fancied their own stage to be final. Each, when it be- 
came an accomplished fact, reacted upon and modified 
what had gone before. 

At present there are unmistakable signs on every 
hand that a farther step is about to be taken. What 
will it be ? That it will still be Christianity no candid 
man can doubt. But it is equally plain that it will 
be as unlike any phase of it heretofore seen as these 
have been and, in their survivals, are unlike each 
other. 

It is clear, in the first place, that Christianity has 
already broken out of the bounds which have long 
contained it. It has broken out of the old bounds of 
Doctrine ; out of the Church ; and will no longer sub- 
mit to conventional "Experiences." There is not a 
single " Confession of Faith " which serves to express 
the actual belief of even the most conservative mem- 
bers of the ministry of any church which is supposed 
to accept such a Confession. They are all in the same 
boat. The Decrees of the Council of Trent, the 



THE NEXT STEP IN CHKISTIANITY 97 

XXXIX. Articles, the Westminster Confession, that 
of Augsburg or Dort, while they all retain a place of 
quasi authority in the several churches, have become 
powerless to hold the real belief of even the clergy. 
That this convicts the clergy of insincerity will only 
be alleged by the shallow and the ignorant. A pro- 
found change has come about against which they are 
helpless. They are honestly trying to readjust the 
conditions with earnestness and singleness of heart. 
Some think to find relief by formally abolishing 
doctrinal formulas which have ceased to be credible. 
Some think to find it by " revising " so as to accommo- 
date the doctrinal statements to the actual beliefs cur- 
rent. Both methods will fail, though it is not in my 
way, in this paper, to say why. I am only concerned 
to point out the fact that religious belief has broken 
out of the formulas which once contained it. 

In the second place, functions which once belonged 
to organized Christianity have, one by one, been taken 
in hand by others. Notable among these are Educa- 
tion and the Administration of Charity. Only one 
branch of the church now makes any serious claim of 
right to control the machinery of education. And, in 
the United States at any rate, a constantly increasing 
number of her adherents either make this claim half- 
heartedly under the pressure of their priesthood, or re- 
fuse to make it altogether. In the distribution of their 
alms rich men do not now, as once, make the Church 
their almoner. Wise men bring gold, frankincense 



98 THE NEXT STEP IN CHKISTIANITY 

and myrrh to the King, but they appoint their own 
agents for its distribution. To speak of those near at 
hand and notable, I name the Girard College, the 
Mills Hotel, the "Williamson School, the Drexel Insti- 
tute, and the secular societies for the organization of 
charity. 

In the third place, good men are, in an increasing 
number of cases, unmoved by the conventional " ex- 
periences " of religion. A century ago " The Great 
Awakening" swept over America like a spiritual 
cyclone. So sturdy a man as Benjamin Franklin 
could not keep his feet against it. The masses were 
swept by it into a religious frenzy. Fitful gusts, 
more local and less intense, have been present ever 
since. But men are less impressible by them. Twenty 
years ago Mr. Moody, the Evangelist, could produce 
" conversions " almost at will. Mr. Moody before he 
died became the Educator. 

What do these changes mean ? 

"What is to be done ? 

To these questions some can give a short and easy 
answer. " It means," say they, " that we are in a day 
of apostasy. It is all due to the hardness of men's 
hearts. We live in the midst of a stiff-necked and re- 
bellious generation." But when these are called upon 
to say what should be done, they give different 
answers. 

The Theologian says, " let us restore to its old com- 
pleteness our Confession, bating of it no word or 



/ 
THE NEXT STEP IN CHRISTIANITY 99 

phrase; and, if we must perish, let us fall like our 
fathers — with the old blue banner in our hands." 

The Ecclesiastic says, " let us restore the Church 
of that period when it had the power to guide the 
steps and control the conduct of all men." 

The Evangelical says, " let us pray." 

They all misread the situation. It has always been 
true, of course, that a large portion of the community 
have been indifferent or hostile to Christianity. They 
are "irreligious" men. They are, therefore, usually 
thought of as immoral men ; for religion and morality 
are, in the common mind, so intimately associated that 
they are thought of as present or absent together. If 
this were the only class to be considered the case 
would be very simple. But a large, and increasingly 
larger, proportion of good men cannot any longer be 
called Christian, if to be a Christian means any one or all 
of those things, which it has, thus far, been officially de- 
fined to mean. They are good men and women, tried 
by any test which may fairly be applied to goodness. 
They are sober, kindly, earnest, sympathetic, clean, 
charitable. But they are " unsound " in doctrine ; they 
are not " church-members " ; they are not aware of 
having undergone any subjective "experience." This 
class is increasing at a rate which few realize. 

Says that Presbyterian, the late Dr. Bruce, Professor 
of New Testament Exegesis, in the Free Church of Glas- 
gow : " I am disposed to think that a great and steadily 
increasing portion of the moral worth of society lies 

LtfC 



100 THE NEXT STEP IN CHRISTIANITY 

outside the Church, separated from it, not by godless- 
ness, but rather by exceptionally intense moral 
earnestness." 

The leadership of science and art is already almost 
entirely in the hands of men who have broken with 
organized Christianity. They are the guides and 
pioneers in political and social reforms. They are a 
large minority — promising soon to be a majority — in 
the management of charitable and reformatory insti- 
tutions. They are the professors in colleges and the 
teachers in normal schools. They are kind husbands, 
faithful wives, good sons, daughters, friends. What 
is their relation to Christianity ? The answer is, they 
are Christians in fact ; hut they are %uaiting for Chris- 
tianity to pass into a new phase which will include 
them inform. 

Like every household, the Church is confronted at 
times with the necessity of house cleaning and rear- 
rangement of furniture. During the disturbance of this 
process a considerable number of the family and rela- 
tives prefer to live out of doors. They will not do so 
permanently. They do not wish to do so. One may 
venture to say, also, that they would play a more 
honorable part if they remained in the house and lent 
a hand, and gave their opinions concerning the proper 
rearrangements, rather than to stand critically outside, 
waiting till the task be done. But things are as they 
are. And they can truthfully retort that their sugges- 
tions of change in doctrine or discipline were not well 



THE NEXT STEP IN OHEISTIANITiT 101 

received when they did remain within. But will the 
Christian society of the future be such as will be able 
to embrace them ? I think it will, and for this reason : 

The formal statement of Christian doctrine, and the 
organization of the Christian church, are always de- 
termined by the actual beliefs and practices which 
precede the formal action. Laws in the religious 
sphere are analogous to laws in the political sphere ; 
they are but the expression of antecedent habits. 
What, then, are the present habits of the religious 
world which will, by and by, find formal expression ? 
Their general drift may be seen in two or three strik- 
ing phenomena. 

1. The altogether unprecedented interest now 
manifest in the person and teaching of Jesus Christ. 
Booksellers tell me that there are only one or two 
books in the English tongue of which so many copies 
are sold as of Ben Hur. Those who have read it 
know that this is not on account of its literary excel- 
lence, great as that is, but because of the way in 
which it introduces Jesus. Dr. Farrar's Life of 
Christ is one of the few books of which it pays to 
produce cheap and popular editions. Now, hardly 
any Life of Christ can be found which dates back 
more than fifty years. They are all the product of 
the nineteenth century. They have all been written 
in response to the increasing desire of the community 
to know just who and what Jesus was, and just what 
He did and said. 



102 THE NEXT STEP IN CHRISTIANITY 

2. The enormous popularity of what one may call 
the " Drummond Literature." The late Scotch Pro- 
fessor's " Natural Law in the Spiritual World," 
and "The Greatest Thing in the World," and such 
like, have been hailed by millions as the statement 
they earnestly desired. With all their shallowness, 
and forced analogies, they do answer the present de- 
sire to express Christianity in terms of actual life. 

3. The strenuous attempt to apply the teaching of 
Jesus to the problems of conduct. John Fiske, 
Tolstoi, Henry George, Powderly, Leo X., and Mr. 
Bellamy, have all formally essayed to point out how 
this can, or ought to be, done. Mr. Fiske, in his 
" Destiny of Man," says, in effect, that this is already 
within the possibility of practical life. Mr. George 
always describes himself as, above all things else, a 
Christian. " Christian Socialism " has become a 
phrase to conjure by. The Christian Churches all 
acknowledge, in a way, their obligation to ease the 
burden of human living. A conservative Churchman 
of fifty years ago, who went regularly on Sunday to 
hear a doctrinal thesis in a Church which was shut up 
and deserted all the rest of the week, would be dumb- 
founded if he could re-visit the old holy place and find 
built on to it a dispensary, a kitchen, a social hall, a 
lyceum, and, mayhap, a stage. 

The change which has come about in the actual 
thought about religion, may be strikingly seen in the 
fact, that the motive of the Order of the Knights of 



THE NEXT STEP IN CHRISTIANITY* 103 

Malta, which existed for the " defence of the Faith," 
and of the Jesuits which existed for the " defence of 
the Church," have become unintelligible or offensive ; 
whereas, a Catholic Total Abstinence Society or a 
Young Man's Christian Association seem natural and 
fitting. 

The machinery for " Bevivals," also, which even a 
generation ago could be set up and worked with 
naievete, is now clearly in its decadence. 

Facts, all pointing in the same direction, might be 
multiplied indefinitely. But to what do they point ? 
To this : Christianity has passed through the phases 
of Dogmatism, Ecclesiasticism and Experimentalism, 
and is now seeking to express itself in the region of 
conduct. 

" But," it will be protested, " Christianity always 
has affected men's conduct, this has been its glory, 
that it has made men good." 

This claim is true, but it is not true in the sense in 
which it is made. The present Archbishop of Canter- 
bury feels called upon to warn the Church of Eng- 
land that it has never " received a shadow of com- 
mission to set forth as Doctrine and Worship that re- 
ligion which began as Morals and Social order." It is 
true that Christianity was at first set forth as a "life." 
The " Faith " which it demanded was not an intel- 
lectual but a moral possession. But when Theology 
began to dominate, the quality of the " life " deterio- 
rated. So far as temper and character are concerned 



104 THE NEXT STEP IN CHRISTIANITY 

there could hardly be a more violent contrast than 
that between the men who formed the first Council at 
Jerusalem and those who discussed the refinements 
of Theology in the fifth century or the sixteenth. 
Where the theological spirit has been in control, it 
has sharply drawn a dividing line across the area of 
thought, calling one portion "sacred" and another 
" profane." 

"Where Ecclesiasticism has controlled, it has por- 
tioned out conduct into " religious " and " secular " ; so 
that the Sicilian bandit, who pays punctiliously his 
duties to the Church, is not conscious of any incon- 
gruity as he crosses himself and mutters an Ave while 
he goes forth to rob. 

Where Evangelicalism has prevailed it has drawn 
the sharpest possible distinction between "religion" 
and " morality," making everything of the one, and 
speaking contemptuously of the other. Luther did 
not hesitate to say that " a Christian cannot if he will 
lose his salvation by any multitude or magnitude of 
sins unless he ceases to believe ; for no sin can damn 
him but unbelief alone." 

So that while it is true in the main that Christianity 
has always had its effect to improve the quality of 
men's lives, it is also true that it has not always set 
this before itself as its main purpose. It has been 
thought of as a device to secure " salvation." Now, 
the interest for " salvation " is surely receding behind 
the interest for " conduct." The appeal is about to be 



THE NEXT STEP IN CHRISTIANITY 105 

taken to life. Christianity will more and more con- 
cern itself with living. 

But in doing so it will not revise nor formally 
abolish its previous methods. What is superfluous in 
them will be allowed to be quietly forgotten. It can- 
not subsist without a Creed, an Organization and an 
Act of Choice by the individual. It gained each one 
of these essentials, as we believe, under the guidance 
of that Spirit of wisdom with which its Founder im- 
bued it. The reality of its life in the past has been 
vindicated by the fact that it has passed on from phase 
to phase even though the mass of its adherents bade it 
rest upon each in turn as a finality. But the Creed 
will be short, broadly marked, portable. The Organ- 
ization will be no more complex than is necessary to 
carry the creed abroad. The initial Experience will 
be nothing beyond the sincere desire for right conduct. 
All will issue in, and be tried by their issue in right 
living. For this purpose and by this means Jesus will 
become more and more available. In this way Chris- 
tianity will be seen to be both far easier and far more 
difficult than it has appeared since the Apostolic days ; 
easier because more intelligible by the moral nature 
to which it addresses itself, and more difficult, because 
that manner of life which He taught and exemplified 
is only possible to supreme faith. 



SCKIPTUKE, INSPIKATIOlSr AND AUTHOKITY 



YI 

SCRIPTURE, INSPIRATION AND AUTHORITY 

Ten years ago Professor Thayer, of Harvard, 
spoke thus to his hearers : 

"But inquirers, you tell me, demand certainties. 
They clamor for immediate and unequivocal answers. 

" Doubtless, and overlook the fact that Divine Wis- 
dom rarely vouchsafes such. If God's Book had had 
the average man for its author, no doubt it would 
have abounded in direct and categoric replies to all 
questions. The most complicated problems of time 
and eternity would be solved by a process as simple 
as the rule of three ! But, alas ! impatient souls, His 
people do not get into the promised land that way." 

Nothing is more pathetic than the centuries-long 
reluctance of Christians to admit the elemental truth 
of their Master's teaching. He came to set His peo- 
ple free, but they shrink from the responsibility of 
freedom. He assured them that they were no longer 
servants, but children ; whereupon they long for the 
minute directions which a master gives to a slave. 
In a word, they have persistently sought for an 
"Authority." It is so much easier to live by rule 
than to live by spirit. At least it seems to be easier. 
In point of fact, the distinguishing feature of the 
religion of Christ is that it vacates all external mas- 
tership, turns the individual soul in upon itself, and 

109 



110 SCRIPTURE, INSPIRATION AND AUTHORITY 

declares that by so doing it will find itself face to face 
with God. It has been well said that of the words 
which express religion, neither the verb "to love" 
nor " to believe " has any imperative mood. Chris- 
tianity is loving and believing. In neither can any 
" Authority " coerce, not even God ! One loves the 
things which he himself finds lovable ; he believes the 
things which for him are believable. In the presence 
of an Authority he may be silent, or he may lie to the 
authority, or he may lie to himself, but the absolute 
situation remains unchanged. 

There have been three conspicuous pretenders to 
the monarch's throne — the Church, the Bible, and 
Keason. To speak more accurately, they have not 
been pretenders so much as they have been worthy 
monarchs whose sceptres have been thrust into their 
reluctant hands by prophets who have known the 
Master's wish in the case, but have yielded to the 
people's cry, " Nay, but we will have a king over us." 
Each of these has in turn played the tyrant, but it 
has always been because the people would have it so. 
Dr. Martineau has championed the cause of Keason as 
the legitimate occupant of the throne as against the 
claims of the Church and the Bible. Cardinal New- 
man has fought for the authority of the Church. A 
hundred Protestant champions have maintained the 
Westminster dictum that " the Scriptures of the Old 
and New Testament are the only rule of faith and 
practice." With all reverence, I believe and say that 



SCRIPTURE, INSPIRATION AND AUTHORITY 111 



the Master would have cried, " A plague on all your 
houses ! " I would not be misunderstood. The 
Church, the Bible, and Human Reason all have their 
necessary place and function in the economy of 
Christ's religion. But that function is not properly 
stated by the word "authority." Authorities they 
are not. Guides, interpreters, if you will, but mas- 
ters, no. 

Four centuries ago a large and influential portion 
of Christendom revolted against the tyranny of the 
Church. They did not thereby cease to be Christians, 
nor did they cease to be Churchmen. They simply 
asserted that they who had been made free men in 
Christ Jesus were not to be brought into bondage by 
any spiritual master. A large portion of the Chris- 
tian world believed then, and believes yet, that this 
revolt was a rebellion against God. They cannot 
think of it as a Reformation. They see in it a form 
of that same lawlessness which caused Satan to be 
cast out of heaven. This is fundamentally the ques- 
tion at issue between Protestantism and Papalism. 
Strictly speaking, Rome has only one doctrine ; that 
is, Submit yourself to authority. Protestantism is 
essentially the assertion that the Christian is the 
friend of the Master, and no longer a servant who 
knoweth not what the master doeth. This position 
was consistently and valiantly maintained by the 
early Reformers. So far as obedience to the Church 
is concerned, they have not yielded yet. Obedience 



112 SCRIPTURE, INSPIRATION" AND AUTHORITY 



to the Churches' commands, as commands, cannot to- 
day be secured in any portion of Protestantism. It is 
every year becoming more difficult to secure by 
Eome. 

But the burden of freedom is very onerous. Be- 
fore the second generation of the Reformers had 
passed away, a movement had set in which had for its 
unconscious purpose to set the Bible upon the same 
throne of authority from which the Church had been 
rudely thrust. The Bible was less fitted for that 
office than the Church had been, nor had it thereto- 
fore been regarded in that aspect by Catholic tradi- 
tion. But the people had begun once more to cry, 
" Nay, but we will have a king over us." It was then 
that the doctrine of " Inspiration " began to be ex- 
ploited. The Bible was first enthroned as "author- 
ity," and thereupon its "inspiration" was urged to 
establish its legitimacy. The whole development of 
the dogma lies within the seventeenth and the first 
half of the eighteenth century, as any one who will 
take the trouble may read. During that time the 
Literoe Scriptce were confirmed in a position- which 
they have held until our own time. The Bible came 
to be called the "Word of God." It became a pal- 
ladium and a charm. The theologian thought of it as 
a complete and final transcript of God's law and pur- 
pose. The common people adored it as a fetich. It 
came to be kissed in the courtroom as the sacred 
thing which alone could invoke truth. It was ap- 



SCRIPTURE, INSPIRATION AND AUTHORITY 113 

pealed to as not only the ultimate but the immediate 
arbiter in every question of faith and conduct. With- 
out its presence in its entirety it was believed that no 
people could know God. By its distribution it was 
believed that that gospel could be spread abroad 
whose Founder had decreed that it should be propa- 
gated only by the contact of living man with living 
man. It came to hold the place in Protestantism 
which the Koran holds in Islam. And all this with- 
out its own consent, and even against its plain pro- 
test ! 

Just now a large portion of the Protestant world is 
disturbed by what it thinks to be a breaking away 
from the authority of the Bible. Is the apprehension 
justified ? What has caused the fear ? What will be 
the outcome of the movement ? Of the ultimate issue 
there can be little question. The servant will be 
handed down out of the seat of the king. The Scrip- 
tures of the Old and New Testament are the product 
of that long and wide movement toward God, at the 
centre of which stands " God manifest in the flesh." 
The Church is that great company of faithful people, 
from every age and every clime, organized and un- 
organized, conscious and unconscious, who, by 
thought, word, and deed, contributed to the bringing 
in of the kingdom of God. The Bible is the litera- 
ture of a movement. The movement produced the 
literature, and not conversely. The movement is 
superior to the literature and controls it. The litera- 



114 SCRIPTURE, INSPIRATION AND AUTHORITY 

ture gains its peculiar character from the unique 
quality of the movement. The movement is the mas- 
ter and the Book is the servant. Within a certain 
very circumscribed area inside the Church, and within 
about three centuries of time, the servant has been 
unwisely elevated into a position to which it never 
claimed title. This action has been confined solely to 
a portion of Protestantism within Great Britain and 
the United States. The task now is to remove the 
Bible from the unwarranted place assigned to it, and 
to do this in such manner that it will not suffer 
diminution of the honor which belongs to it of right 
and in its own place. But the task must be done. 

Two classes of people within the nominal frontier 
of Protestantism fiercely oppose the doing of it. 
These are, first, the extreme Protestants, whose whole 
fabric of religious thought is so based upon the idea 
of an infallible written revelation that they cannot 
conceive the fabric standing when the foundation 
should be withdrawn. The other is a comparatively 
small group of Churchmen who are so enamored of 
the very principle of authority in religion that they 
cannot abide question of any authority, even though 
it be one of which they themselves take small heed. 
These two join their voices in an outcry against the 
same kind of dealing with the Scripture which has 
been freely allowed always and everywhere within 
the universal Church, with the exception of the limited 
time and area above mentioned. But the majority is 



SCRIPTURE, INSPIRATION AND AUTHORITY 115 

against them. All Catholic tradition is against them. 
The Bible itself refuses to side with them. The re- 
sult is foregone. 

But what, then, becomes of the " Doctrine of In- 
spiration " ? To this I reply, The Catholic Church has 
no doctrine of inspiration. It has what it believes to be 
a fact. But it has never denned the fact or elevated it 
into a dogma. Only within the limited time and area 
before mentioned has this been done. Hence it hap- 
pens that only within that area is the present perplex- 
ity felt. The Eastern Church cannot comprehend the 
difficulty. The Koman Church is untouched by it. 
The Anglican Church is disturbed by it only to the 
extent to which she has informally committed herself 
to a Protestant dogma. Officially she does not recog- 
nize any dogma of inspiration. She is content with 
stating what books are included within the sacred 
writings, and with declaring that no belief is to be 
exacted as a condition of membership in the Church 
which is not recognized in them. 

That the threescore little books bound up together 
in our Bible possess a unique quality has always been 
recognized by those who were qualified to discern 
that quality. It is because they possessed this qual- 
ity that they survived while their contemporary 
writings have perished. But the name hj which this 
quality shall be called is quite another matter. The 
word " inspiration " suited the fact well enough so 
long as the word retained its original indefiniteness of 



116 SCRIPTURE, INSPIRATION AND AUTHORITY 

connotation. It is a serious question now, however, 
whether it can be happily employed within the area 
where it has been so long misemployed. It misleads. 
By ancient and universal usage, " inspiration " was 
credited to certain men who spoke or wrote. By 
local and modern usage, inspiration is attached, not to 
the men, but to the thing spoken or written. A legiti- 
mate metonymy has created an illegitimate dogma. 
That certain men of old spake as they were moved by 
the Holy Ghost is beyond question. But the impulse 
of the Spirit of Holiness is a moral and not an intel- 
lectual one. It does not guarantee accuracy, but it is 
recognized by the moral sense of the hearer. This is 
why the words of some men have survived and are a 
living force in the moral movement of the race. The 
men were inspired. 

But what authority shall decide which men have 
been inspired, and what writings possess the unique 
quality due thereto ? I reply, no external decision 
can determine. No decree, no council, no obiter dicta, 
can attach the label " inspired " to any book with the 
certainty that it will adhere. The final appeal is to 
the Christian consciousness. When that has spoken, 
a General Council can but register its decree. It may 
be that in certain instances its voice has not been 
waited for, or that it has been constrained by ecclesi- 
astical pressure, or that a judgment has been made by 
a passing authority against its silent protest. No 
doubt. But the simple fact that a literature frag- 



SCRIPTURE, INSPIRATION AND AUTHORITY 117 

nientary, incomplete, undistinguished by literary skill 
or intellectual brilliancy, has remained through the 
centuries a constant, living stimulus and corrective to 
the world's conscience, establishes its origin from the 
Spirit of Holiness. It is true that the Church lived 
for several centuries without it; that it would not 
perish were the Bible to be lost. This is but to say 
that salvation is not made contingent upon the ability 
to read and write. But when all is said, the fact still 
remains that the writings which we call sacred are 
sacred. Not because they burst into the world 
through any earthquake of divine visitation, not be- 
cause they are sent forth by any mighty blast of 
ecclesiastical wind, but because in them speaks the 
still, small voice, at the sound of which every true 
prophet and man of God covers his face. What au- 
thority they possess rests upon this fact. The capac- 
ity to inspire is the only and the sufficient evidence of 
inspiration. 

But this quality which they possess, they possess in 
unequal degree. Whether or not any may perchance 
be included in the canon which possess it not at all 
only time can show. But this would require long 
time. Even a possession of twenty centuries' tenure 
does not establish an indefeasible title. And a Gen- 
eral Council in the thirtieth century would have just 
the same power to pronounce the Christian judgment 
in the premises, and, if need be, to reverse a previous 
judgment that a Council of the fifth century had to 



118 

reverse one of the third. There is no such thing as 
prescriptive right in the kingdom of Christ. 

If it be objected that this way of thinking vacates 
the Holy Scriptures of all divine authority, two an- 
swers are forthcoming. The first is that this is the 
way in which the Church throughout all the centuries 
and to-day has regarded and does regard them. The 
only exception in time is the three centuries last past, 
and in space is a portion of the Protestant world of 
Great Britain and the United States. The other an- 
swer is, It does vacate them of all authority except 
this intrinsic power to inspire. It rests content with 
the doctrine of the Apostle that " every God-breathed 
writing is profitable for teaching, reproof, correction, 
and instruction in righteousness." 

In righteousness; not in science, not in history, 
not in geography or ethnology. To this, which is es- 
sentially the Catholic doctrine of Holy Scripture, 
what can criticism or scholarship do? What if it 
should appear that the human race began ages before 
Eden, or that Moses did not write the Pentateuch, or 
that there were two Isaiahs, or that the gospel which 
goes by his name was not written by the beloved dis- 
ciple ? Proof of these things would no more touch 
the intrinsic quality by which the books live than the 
discovery that the alabaster box had been carved at 
Babylon and not in Jerusalem would affect the fra- 
grance of the precious nard contained therein. 

We have come to a time in the history of the 



119 

Christian world when nothing but realities will be 
tolerated. Only those things can be accepted as 
sacred which awake the sense of reverence. Only 
those things are inspired which can themselves inspire. 
There need be no fear to submit the Christian Scrip- 
tures to this test ; nor need any one f utilely imagine 
that he can secure exemption for them from this test. 
I would add a word, moreover, about the attitude 
of Churchmen toward this question of Holy Scripture. 
One looks with a mixed feeling of amazement at the 
spectacle of the Bishops of Springfield and western 
New York joining their voices in the outcry against 
Dr. Briggs. One is tempted to invoke the dead 
tongues of Newman or Ewer or De Koven to warn 
them that they are shouting with the wrong side. 
Even their rage at Broad Churchmen ought not to 
seduce them to tear down their own house. The gov- 
erning principle of that which is called the Higher 
Criticism is the belief that the literature of the historic 
Church is the product of the historic Church. But 
this is also the Catholic doctrine of Holy Scripture. 
The High Churchman ought to see that if the ipsis- 
sima verba of the canon be erected into an authority 
which may not be canvassed without sacrilege, the 
real foundation for the Church's order and structure 
will be vacated. This was the contention of the 
Elizabethan High Churchmen against the Puritans. 
This was Hooker's ground in his reply to Travers and 
Cartwright, and he writes this for the heading of his 



120 SCRIPTURE, INSPIRATION AND AUTHORITY 

second book : " Concerning their position who urge 
reformation in the Church of England, namely, that 
Scripture is the only rule of all things which in this 
life may be done by men." This was the position of 
Seabury and Hobart and Bishop Hopkins. None of 
these men, I can but believe, would have permitted 
themselves to be so infatuated with the principle of 
" authority " as to allow themselves to become the 
allies of the descendants of the Westminster General 
Assembly. 

The question of Holy Scripture is one which the 
High Churchman who Jcnows the ground upon which he 
stands is not vexed by. It does not touch him, so 
long as he keeps out of questionable company. It is 
open to him to say to the scholar, " God speed you, 
lay bare the truth, analyze the documents, identify 
the authors, fix the dates, lay bare contradictions, 
convict the spurious if there be such, take the books to 
pieces and arrange the parts in chronological order if 
you can. JSTone of these conclusions can touch the 
thing for which we use and revere the literature of 
the kingdom of God." 

But if neither the Church nor the Bible nor the 
reflective Reason are authorities before whom the 
soul must bow itself, then where is a master? At 
this point we want to examine more carefully the 
word used. There is a fatal confusion in the popular 
use of the word " authority." I have used the word 
throughout in its etymological sense. An authority 



SCRIPTURE, INSPIRATION AND AUTHORITY 121 

is a master who can get himself obeyed under pen- 
alty. In the region where this discussion moves, only 
a de facto sovereign is worth considering. A mere de 
jure authority is of no consequence. Now, in most 
of the discussion concerning the " Seat of Authority 
in Keligion," men have been content with spinning 
academic arguments to prove the legitimacy of this or 
that " authority." One has been content to prove 
that men should " hear the Church " ; another, to 
prove that " the Scripture is the only rule of faith 
and practice " ; another, " that men should be gov- 
erned by the deliverances of right Keason." They 
are beautiful arguments, but they are like the fine- 
spun pleas of the nonjurors for the " divine right " of 
the impotent Stuarts. What is wanted is an author- 
ity which can get itself obeyed under penalty. And 
that is precisely what none of those above mentioned 
can do. My quarrel is the same with the bibliolater, 
the ecclesiastic, and the rationalist. They all, and all 
alike, sit down satisfied when they have reached an 
authority which in their opinion ought to be final. 
What difference whether it ought to be or not, if it is 
not? 

The real vice of all these champions of " authority " 
is that they cannot admit the reality of God govern- 
ing directly. They have the feeling that a moral 
cause can go before the Almighty only on appeal 
from a lower court. The contention of Jesus is that 
God has original jurisdiction, and that He has ma- 



122 SCRIPTURE, INSPIRATION AND AUTHORITY 

chinery for communicating His judgments. This is 
what the Jews could not take in. They lived by 
" authority." The priest, the lawyer, and the scribe 
spoke to them the final word. When Jesus bade them 
venture immediately into the presence of God their 
Father, they were shocked and scandalized. His dis- 
ciples, however, gathered courage to follow Him, and 
so were made free men in Christ Jesus. In the cen- 
turies since, they have always tended to grow weary 
of the burden of liberty, and to turn to the eccle- 
siastic, the scribe, and the logician, begging to be 
ruled. 

The real authority in the moral sphere is the actual 
concurrence of the will of God with the moral con- 
sciousness of the individual. Whenever this concur- 
rence is reached in any particular case, the individual 
recognizes it. He may not obey it, but that is be- 
cause he prefers to bear the penalty rather than to do 
God's will, but he knows that the King has spoken. 
He knows it just as the organ-builder knows that a 
pipe speaks the right note. He may be long in find- 
ing the note. He tries it with the octaves above and 
below ; he tries it with other stops and combinations. 
For a time there are discords and vibrations. But at 
last the pipe gives the sound which the tuner has been 
striving for. When it once speaks aright, there is no 
longer any doubt. The music, the organ and the ear fit 
together, and the player has the same certitude of mu- 
sical truth that he has of his own being. The author- 



SCRIPTURE, INSPIRATION AND AUTHORITY 123 

ity has spoken. In the moral sphere one who seeks 
finality in truth and duty brings a question before 
the Keason to test its reasonableness ; before the 
Bible to see whether or nut it accords with the moral 
movement of the kingdom of God ; before the Church 
for the contemporary opinion of the brotherhood of 
righteousness. He seeks for the harmonious testimony 
of all the parts of the whole great organ of life that his 
voice is attuned to the music of God. When he has 
found it, he is satisfied, for he knows what is truth 
and what is duty. 

The Church, the Bible, the Eeason, are ushers to 
bring the soul into the presence of the King. Who 
asserts for them an authority of their own wrongs 
both them and their Maker. 



THE FALL — UPWAKD 



YII 



A well-known writer in a well-known Eeview 
lately made this statement : 

" It is easy to see that the ' New Theology ' is about 
prepared to join hands with Darwinianism, and oblit- 
erate the doctrine of the Fall as underlying the fact 
that ' the Word was made flesh.' " 

It is the peculiarity of the " New Theology " that no 
one is officially authorized to speak for it, but I ven- 
ture to think that the above statement will be silently 
admitted by those who are under its influence as being 
substantially true. I venture also to say why this 
judgment is accepted by those in whom it has reached 
the distinctness of a judgment. 

The existence of moral evil is not denied by any. 

There are in the field three theories as to its origin 
and nature. Of course these theories are not held dis- 
tinctly and unmixed. The same person may, and, in 
point of fact, often does, hold mutually antagonistic 
fragments of different theories in doctrine and philos- 
ophy and may be as strenuous in support of one part 
of his contradictory creed as of another. But in the 
case before us the three theories are easily separable, 
in thought at least. 

127 



128 

(1) The first is that of what for convenience' sake 
may be called " orthodoxy." 

According to it there was, long ago, a primeval 
world which was a paradise. It had a genial climate 
and a fertile soil. No ice-bound oceans or burning 
deserts, no thorns or brambles, no predacious beast or 
pestilential wind, were there. The world was young 
and wholesome. No nerve had ever thrilled with 
pain, nor any living creature looked upon the face of 
death. The plains were smiling with perennially 
golden grain, and the forest bountiful with pendent 
fruit. In this Paradise God walked, and was lonely. 
In it He set the newly fashioned Adam, the first indi- 
vidual of his race. Into his arms He graciously gave 
the maiden Mother of us all. He created them im- 
mortal. Their wisdom was transcendant ; their inno- 
cence absolute. 

But with Adam God made a covenant. The matter 
of the agreement was, that perfect obedience and un- 
broken righteousness would be rewarded by continual 
bliss, and warranty against pain and death ; and that 
for disobedience the punishment should be capital. 
The parties to the agreement were God of the first 
part, and Adam the party of the second part. Adam 
did not enter into the covenant for himself alone, but 
as the representative of all his race yet unbegotten. 
They were to have their chance in him, and to stand 
forfeit if he failed. (Whether the covenant were to 
remain in force eternally, or whether, after a certain 



-UPWAED 129 

time passed in obedience, he was to have been con- 
firmed in an indefeasible right, does not appear.) The 
simple test for the first man's power of moral endur- 
ance was to be his abstention from a certain attractive 
kind of fruit in the garden where he dwelt. An in- 
sidious tempter appeared from some unknown and un- 
suspected quarter, enlisted the more pliable nature of 
Eve on the side of disobedience, and through her broke 
down the moral resistance of man. He failed in the 
test, and catastrophe unspeakable was let loose ! Smit- 
ten suddenly with shame and pain, the offenders crept 
away already moribund. The voice of God rolling in 
thunder discovered their hiding-place. The flashing 
lightning of an offended heaven burned between them 
and their bower. The jealous earth shot up from her 
bosom the " upas and the deadly nightshade " among 
the kindly forest, and choked the wheat with thorns 
and brambles. The wild beasts, filled, for the first 
time with cruel rage and hunger, rent and devoured 
one another. The natures of the offenders themselves 
underwent a sudden ferment, which left them trans- 
formed and totally depraved. Their unborn children 
not only inherited the taint, but were bound by all the 
penalties appended to the original contract broken by 
their father and representative. Thus death physical 
and moral, the depravity of every son of Adam, and 
all the thousand ills that flesh is heir to, both in this 
world and in any world yet to come, are all the out- 
come of that transaction which, in popular religion and 



130 

in technical theology, is named "The Fall." Most 
Continental and American theology is based upon this 
notion. So unconventional a thinker as Dr. Bushnell 
has a strange chapter induced by the theory. If death 
literally came by Adam, how then to account for its 
undoubted dominion over the lower animals for aeons 
before Adam was made ? The " dragons weltering in 
their prime " lived by tearing one another, and were 
so equipped by nature that they could not live other- 
wise. Dr. Bushnell, seeing this difficulty, hits upon 
the ingenious theory of what he calls " The anticipa- 
tive consequences of sin." * That is, the sin which was 
to be, cast its shadow backward, and covered the earth 
from its beginning ! 

The theory before us cannot be more clearly stated 
than in the words of the " Larger Catechism " ap- 
pended to the Westminster Confession of Faith : " The 
' Fall ' brought upon mankind the loss of communion 
with God, His displeasure and curse, so that we are by 
nature children of wrath, bond slaves to Satan, and 
justly liable to all punishment in this world and the 
world to come." 

Now, whence came this notion ? In the Old Testa- 
ment there is no allusion to it whatever. There every 
case of moral obliquity is referred to the deliberate 
and wanton choice of the person offending. His fault 
is never modified, or the quality of his guilt deemed to 
be affected, by his relation to Adam. He is in every 

1 Nature and Supernatural, ch. vii. 



-UPWAKD 131 

case accounted worthy or blameworthy, not for what 
he is qua man, but for what he does of his own 
choice. 1 

The " Fall " is never referred to by Jesus in any 
form. If His words and precepts stood alone in the 
New Testament the transaction would be overlooked 
completely. He concerns Himself with the springs of 
human conduct as they exist now. He uncovers and 
fortifies new and obscured motives. He refers 
righteousness to the indwelling of the Spirit of God, 
but never refers sin to the indwelling of the spirit of 
Adam. 

In the Apocalypse, which unfolds the last scenes in 
the drama of humanity, there is no reference to a 
great catastrophe at its beginning, and the denouement 
would seem to be incompatible with such a first act. 

The Catholic Creeds are entirely silent concerning 
it. The Articles of the Christian Faith, assent to 
which is a condition precedent to membership in the 
Christian Church, have nothing whatever to say con- 
cerning the transaction known as the "Fall." 

From all this it seems evident, that if the "New 
Theology " sits somewhat loosely to this theory, it 
does not thereby argue itself to be irreverent toward 
the highest authority or indifferent to fundamental 
truth. 

The portion of Christian Scripture by which the 

'Edersheim: "Life of Christ," vol. i., book 1. "JB is entirely un- 
known also to Rabbinical Judaism. 17 



132 

theory has been always upheld is St. Paul's Epistle to 
the Eomans, the fifth chapter, beginning at the 
twelfth verse. To the untheological reader the mean- 
ing is sufficiently evident. The propagandist of the 
new Faith declares that his principal, Jesus of Naz- 
areth, is of divine origin, and has moral relations 
with every human being. But, just as all men are af- 
fected by the character and actions of their original 
ancestor " Adam," so the whole race stands affected 
by the character and actions of the Second " Adam." 
This seems to be all that the writer had in mind. He 
is concerned with the position of Jesus, and only uses 
the accepted story of Adam as an illustration and 
analogy, good for what is good. But instead of being 
allowed to remain in the subordinate position of an 
analogy, it has unfortunately been elevated into a 
capital position among Christian dogmas. 

The history of the dogma is, in rough lines, easily 
traced. 1 It was developed by that great system 
builder, Augustine. It passed, together with the rest 
of his theology, into general acceptance in the Western 
Church. It was elaborated into curious detail during 
the busy idleness of the scholastic period. Dante 
popularized the story of the Edenic Paradise for the 
Latin races, as did Milton for the English-speaking 
people. Luther, the Augustinian monk, brought the 
theory with him from his cloister. Calvin accepted it 
from his master Augustine, and made it the starting- 

1 Hagenbach : ' ' History of Doctrine, ' ' p. 59. 



133 

point of his system. Through these various channels 
it has come since the Eeformation into the popular 
mind to be the accepted Christian teaching concerning 
the moral status of man. 

That the theory, both in itself and in its conse- 
quences, is entirely untenable would seem to be evi- 
dent from merely stating it. It is so well intrenched, 
however, that more than this is necessary. To any 
one who has come under the influence of that mode 
of thinking known as evolutionary, such a castas- 
trophe as that of the " Fall " is a priori incredible. 
Such a thing is out of analogy, both natural and spir- 
itual. On the face of it (if it be so read), it is a case of 
sudden and violent degradation interjected between 
two periods of steady progress. Up to the date of 
the " Fall," and from that date forward, the progress 
is undenied. Instances of degradation, both in in- 
dividuals and families, are very common, but they dif- 
fer from this alleged one in that they are slow, final, 
and irretrievable. Their subjects are left stranded on 
one side of the stream of progress. There is no 
farther use for them, and they cease to be. The Mil- 
tonic " Fall," on the other hand, is sudden, inconclu- 
sive, and the penal cause assigned is no sufficient 
rationale in the absence of any moral or religious ob- 
ligation to accept the fact. The " total depravity " 
supposed to have been the consequence of this trans- 
action is not a fact, and never has been. A human 
being without inherent moral goodness — inherent in 



13i 

the same way as his humanity itself— is something no 
one has ever seen. It has been imagined in technical 
theology, but its actual counterpart is to be looked for, 
not in any man or woman, but in Mephistopheles or a 
Houyhnhnm. Apart from the somewhat artificial 
language of the pulpit, neither the idea nor the fact 
ever occurs. 

The associated dogma of inherited guilt is practi- 
cally obsolete also. True, it survives in the standards 
of some Christian bodies, but it has ceased to be a 
conviction to which one may appeal to influence con- 
duct. What preacher would dare to assert boldly, 
"You deserve to be damned for your share in 
Adam's act of disobedience " ? 

The dogma is no longer held on the authority of 
Augustine, or rejected with Pelagius ; it has simply 
fallen out of sight in consequence of its intrinsic un- 
worthiness and essential immorality. The "New 
Theology " does not accept it or reject it ; it passes it 

by- 

(2) The theory has in some quarters been rudely 
displaced by another, which seems to be radically op- 
posed to it. Indeed, the place occupied by it is the 
one most strenuously fought for by all the forces at 
present in the field. The Theist, the Secularist, the 
Evolutionist, or the Christian, — whichever one is able 
to capture and hold this ground, — possesses the key to 
the battle of modern thought. What is the ground 
and origin of human Right and Wrong? Whoso 



135 

holds the key to this will win the battle. For, prac- 
tically, men value morals above all else. It is ad- 
mitted on all hands that the sense of right and wrong 
does exist, and that it is, in its degree, at any rate, the 
distinguishing mark of man. But the real question is, 
" Whence comes it, and in what consists its binding 
force ? " Those of the extreme Eight say it is an 
original endowment of man from God, formerly per- 
fect, but now shattered and untrustworthy. Those of 
the extreme Left say, without hesitation, that it is a 
faculty which has been slowly developed in man out 
of the interaction of himself and his fellows with their 
surroundings. In the crude barbarianism which they 
consider to be the original status of the race, certain 
actions were quickly found to tend to the general wel- 
fare, while certain other actions were found to work 
detriment to the tribe. The first sort of course 
tended to the popularity, and the second brought pain 
or danger to the individual producing them. The 
glow of satisfaction produced in the doer of helpful 
things encouraged him to the habit of such actions. 
Murder, theft, adultery, having been found to be dan- 
gerous to the community, were warmly reprehended. 
This public sense of dislike to the deeds reacted upon 
the individuals who felt it, gradually became fixed in 
each one, and was transmitted to his descendants. It 
had its origin in the public weal. It emerges, how- 
ever, generations afterward, in a permanent faculty, 
which " had lost its memory and changed its name." 



136 THE FALL, — UPWARD 

Nor has it remained the simple faculty it was when it 
first became self-conscious. Long afterward it, in Mr. 
Matthew Arnold's happy figure, came to be touched 
by the fire of Emotion, and burst into the flame of 
Keligion. Since the death of the late Professor Clif- 
ford, this theory has not had another so able and un- 
compromising an advocate. With certain modifica- 
tions due to his more cautious and judicious habit of 
mind, it is the doctrine of Mr. Herbert Spencer. In 
popular scientific periodicals it is assumed to have 
been demonstrated. It has found a lodgment in 
the text-books of schools. It is the basis of action 
for " Societies for Ethical Culture." The theory is 
claimed to be, in Professor Clifford's language, "a 
scientific basis for morals." That very prevalent 
habit of mind which abhors an unsolved problem as 
nature abhors a vacuum, receives and rests upon it 
with peculiar satisfaction. Wherever this theory and 
the popular notion of the " Fall " are sole rivals claim- 
ing entertainment by educated men, this one is almost 
certain of a welcome. 

And this, notwithstanding the fact that it is at- 
tended by the very gravest difficulties, both scientific 
and moral. The more sober-minded evolutionists, 
whether Christian or Secular, do not accept it. They 
do not consider it scientific. The facts in the case 
cannot be coordinated under it. The savage state 
where the conscience is supposed by the holders of it 
first to emerge is precisely the place where the pos- 



THE FALL, — UPWARD 137 

sessor of moral sensibility would be most unfit to sur- 
vive. Where might is right, right is doomed to death. 
Among unmoral creatures, any variation in the direc- 
tion of morality tends toward the extinction of its 
possessor. The faculty coming into existence there is 
compelled by the exigency of the case to commit hari- 
kari. It is " too good to live." " The survival of the 
fittest" is an irrefragable law, which may not be 
suspended even in the interest of moral theory. 

Then, again, the induction upon which its advocates 
base the scientific theory of morals is open to the 
grave suspicion of having been arranged in the inter- 
est of the theory. In the nature of the case the facts 
are difficult to come by, and one cannot help suspect- 
ing that the same skill (as of Sir John Lubbock, e.g.) 
which arranges them in one way could just as easily 
sort and arrange them so as to produce an entirely dif- 
ferent result. TV r ithin the historic period, at any rate, 
there has not as yet been forthcoming any instance of 
a tribe or people making moral advance without the 
aid of light brought to them ah extra. In many in- 
stances a very high degree of civilization has been at- 
tained to by their unaided development. A Yenus di 
Milo, and a code of Roman Law, have proven them- 
selves to be within reach, but not a Sister of Charity, 
or a John Baptist. 

Present facts are also against the theory. There is 
no constant relation between knowledge and goodness, 
nor is there any evidence of a tendency now on the 



138 

part of the vicious to learn righteousness by the bit- 
terness of their experience in sin. The theory, indeed, 
is discredited by the eagerness with which the chronic 
wrongdoer accepts it. Anarchists, Socialists, Inger- 
sollites, — the whole ignoble company of questionable 
morality — hail it as truth. One cannot avoid the 
feeling that it is, at least in part, welcome because it 
lightens the stress of moral obligation. The charge of 
Lacordaire would seem to be at least colorable, that 
" it consoles us for our vices by calling them neces- 
sities, bringing in as a witness to this a corrupt heart 
disguised in the mantle of science." 

(3) But the two theories above indicated are not 
the only claimants to a hearing upon the question of 
the moral progression of man. A third, contained 
compendiously in Genesis ii. and iii., and writ large in 
the whole Christian Scriptures, we believe. 

The story in Genesis is too familiar to need rehears- 
ing. It will suffice to point out that it assumes to be 
a distinct account of a veritable occurrence. It is 
sharply separated from what precedes and follows in 
the narrative, though evidently related to both. Like 
the portion of the story which precedes it, it moves with 
majestic stride, an aaon in a paragraph, with space for 
a year of God's days between verses. It is couched in 
a language so oriental and so poetic that even 
Augustine warned against dangerous literalness 
here. 

The first chapter, and to the fourth verse of the 



UPWARD 139 

second, sketches the whole of creation, from the chaotic 
nebulous mist to the introduction of the creature fash- 
ioned in the image of God, which is called " Adam," 
i.e., man. This sketch is the mighty frame into which 
all that comes after is to be fitted. This having been 
completed, it proceeds to recount the history of the 
creation in which the whole long-drawn movement has 
culminated. It refers most briefly to the preparation 
of the earth to his use, 1 connects him as to his physical 
side with matter, 2 endows him with life, 3 and then 
enters upon the history of the development of maris 
moral and religious life, which is the subject matter 
of the Old and New Testament Scriptures. This 
progress is conceived to be by a series of continually 
recurring selections. The first of these is recorded in 
the story before us. There is no intimation there that 
" Adam " and " Eve " were the absolute beginning of 
the race. There is nothing in the word Adam to in- 
dicate whether it means man, or is a proper name for 
an individual. It may mean either. In point of fact, 
it is used in both senses — as the word " day " is used 
both for the whole time covered by the creative proc- 
ess and for one of its periods. For the writer of 
Genesis, having for his purpose to narrate the moral 
development of the race, it was sufficient to begin 
where that began. To this end he states that God 
took a man and a woman, — (i.e., a family), — set them 
in circumstances where the new faculty with which 

1 Gen. ii. 5. 2 lb. 7. 3 lb. 7. 



140 

He had endowed them would have its proper and 
necessary environment. That this selection left to the 
natural process of degradation those who were not 
chosen would seem probable from the following con- 
siderations : 

1. It is in the analogy of God's method of dealing 
with men since history has recorded the same. Thus 
Genesis occupies itself only with the fortunes of Seth 
and his line. Cain, his brother, is permitted to wander 
to the land of Nod, 1 where he founded a nation, — a 
nation which passed through the stages of pastoral 
life, 2 concentration in cities, 3 developed the industries, 
blossomed into art, burst into music, 4 and then passed 
forever out of sight and hearing. Abraham is selected 
from his Acadian followers, while they are left to com- 
plete the cycle of a civilization untouched by any di- 
vine Spirit, and then sink into their decay. Isaac is 
taken, and Ishmael is left. Jacob is chosen, and Esau 
rejected, — and so following. " One shall be taken, and 
the other left " seems to have been the method of 
God's procedure always. Selection implies a cor- 
responding rejection. The Bible is as remorseless as 
science itself. For the purpose of Scripture, moral fit- 
ness is the test. The calling of Adam would seem to 
be only the first of many such selections, not differing 
in kind from that of Abraham. 

2. In certain obscure nooks and corners of the 
earth, there exist small groups of creatures, which, 

^en. iv. 16. 2 Ib. iv. 20. 3 Ib. iv. 17. *Ib. iv. 22. 



-UPWARD 141 

while among men, seem not to be of them. 1 They 
have in their persons and their languages traces of 
better days. They seem to have been left stranded 
by the stream of development. So low in the scale of 
intelligence, so destitute of moral sense, are they, that 
it is difficult for one to look upon them and believe 
that they belong to the race which has the first Adam 
at its start and the second Adam at its culmination. 

3. Traditions of the " Fall " are only found among 
those whose ancestry can be traced to a common 
origin, or who have come in contact with the race of 
Adam at some point in their history. 

A family is chosen by God, and led by His provi- 
dence into a fertile and well-watered country, 2 rich in 
gold and precious stones, 3 surrounded by the flora and 
fauna 4 which are the concomitants always of civiliza- 
tion. 5 In these surroundings occur that chapter in 
human history, which, whether relatively or absolutely 
the beginning, is, at any rate, a supreme epoch. It is 
the beginning of human religion. 

The story sounds far away, and strange. To one 
who is accustomed to the precision of modern scien- 
tific statements, it even seems grotesque, — an echo of 
the childish stories of a youthful world ! Taken 

1 For example : the Bushmen, the Australian aborigines, the 
Veddahs of Ceylon, etc. 

2 Gen. ii. 8. 3 lb. ii. 11. * lb. ii. 9, 20. 

6 It seems hardly necessary to point out that ' ' Garden ' ' in this con- 
nection is a misleading term. The idea of extremely limited space, 
■which the word conveys, is foreign to the story. "Paradise," in its 
classical use, is better. The idea is, an expanse of park-like territory. 



142 

broadly, however, it manifests an insight which on 
any theory, save the Christian, it would be folly to 
look for in such an early time. It rests morality upon 
those clear foundations where the broad communis 
sensus of intelligent and upright men instinctively 
look for it. It declares : 

1. A personal God who can speak. 

2. A human faculty which can hear. 

3. A power of will which can choose. 

4. That the essence of wrongdoing consists, not in 
damage to the community, hut in disobedience to God. 

This new family of Adam, alone of all creatures, 
having reached the stage of knowing right and wrong, 
have their newborn faculty nourished and developed 
by food convenient, and in a fit environment. In the 
garden of the world they feed upon the fruit of the 
" tree of knowledge of good and evil." " Forbidden " 
fruit it is indeed, — food which may be eaten only at a 
dreadful risk. Knowledge brings judgment always, 
and must pay the price of its being. When moral 
faculty rises to the state of self-consciousness, brute- 
like innocence is left behind forever. The way of re- 
turn is closed as by Cherubim with fiery swords. 
Profound degradation is possible thereafter, but not 
along the lines by which the creature came. He can 
move downward but not backward. His fellowship 
is no longer with the gentle creatures of the garden, 



•UPWARD 143 

whose nature he heretofore shared, but with their 
Maker and their God. 

" And the Lord God said : Behold the man is be- 
come as one of us, to know good and evil. And now, 
lest he put forth his hand and take of the tree of life 
and live forever, — therefore the Lord God sent him 
forth from Eden ; and He placed at the East of the 
garden Cherubim, with flaming sword which turned 
every way." 

" And so I live, you see, 
Go through the world, try, prove, reject, 
Prefer, still struggling to effect 
My warfare ; happy that I can 
Be crossed and thwarted as a man , 
Not left, in God's contempt, apart, 
With ghastly, smooth life, dead at heart, 
Tame in Earth's paddock as her prize ! " 

Of the outcome of the transaction, there can be no 
doubt. It was clearly great gain, — maybe a falling 
short of the best then possible, but clearly a rise above 
what went before. Something better still did come 
into the field of moral vision, even then. The " Tree 
of Life," the possibility of immortality, was there. 
But it came into sight only, a long way off, and out 
of reach. Only as a memory and a hope did it survive 
in the tedious steps of progress, until, in the fullness of 
time, the perfect Man " brought life and immortality 
to light." 

Moreover, there comes crawling upon the stage, the 
wily, ignoble representative of moral Evil. When 



144 THE FALL, — UPWAED 

man emerges as a moral being, he must take his place, 
perforce, in the league of spiritual states. He has 
thenceforth to clo with many interests. He is a "be- 
ing of large discourse, looking before and after." It 
is no fantastic oriental conceit which introduces Satan 
to the first man who could comprehend his forked 
speech. That man must confront the Eternal Nay in 
virtue of his station. The doctrine of supernatural 
evil is developed in the Christian Scriptures pari 
passu with the process of redemption. The Christian 
smiles when he hears the fact of such existence called 
in question. He is quite aware that in the Secular 
Creed there is no Prince of Darkness. But he knows 
also that there be a thousand things not dreamed of 
by that philosophy. He reads hopefully the obscure 
prophecy of better things to be attained through much 
pain, by the seed of the woman, and he knows that 
much of that evil is neither brute nor human. If it 
were, he should despair of the race at the outset. His 
solace and his ground of hope, when the brute within 
him is turbulent and the spirit of man is overladen, 
is the consideration that "it is not I, but sin that 
dwelleth in me." 

The first of these theories, briefly sketched, is pro- 
pounded by the popular and so-called " Orthodoxy " ; 
the second by the Secular Science ; the third by the 
Christian Scriptures. The first is moribund. The 
second is dangerous. The third is substantially true. 
Make what allowance one will for the obscurity, the 



145 

puerility, of the story, the fact still remains, that the 
moral progress of the race has been but the develop- 
ing of the picture there sketched in broad outline. 
He whose way of thinking has been most profoundly 
impressed by the great thought of Evolution compre- 
hends it best. He finds himself caught in the sweep 
of a majestic movement similar in kind to that which 
he has followed from the monad to the man. Here 
again, as at other times, the progress halted, either 
helpless or at fault, and God vouchsafed the gift of 
a new motive force. Here His Gift is nothing less 
than the inbreathing of His own spirit. It endows 
its recipient with that Divine quality in virtue of 
which he is capable, under suitable conditions, of 
being "born again." It accounts for the complex 
and contradictory impulses which contend in the 
arena of the soul. It accounts for the old man as 
well as the new. It tells him the name and origin 
and limitation of the strange tempter which whispers 
in the secret chambers of his heart. It brings him 
in sight of immortality, and bids him long and 
strive mightily therefor. It bids him work amid 
briers and thorns ; but when he lifts up his face he 
hears that " he has become as one of us." It binds 
him to God. It gives him sanction for conduct, and 
hope for infinite progression. It sets him in the sweep 
of a dramatic movement. It accounts for the faults 
of the patriarch, for the faith of the apostle, and the 
faultlessness of the Perfect Man. 



THE KOLE OF BELIEF 



VIII 

THE KOLE OF BELIEF 

It is high time that we Christians ask ourselves so- 
berly, " Just what do we believe ? — and just why do 
we believe it ? " It will not do to reply that we be- 
lieve what the Christian Church has always believed ; 
for that is not true. Let one undertake the study of 
the religious life of the United States, for instance, be- 
ginning, let us say at 1825, and he will have no great 
difficulty in setting down item by item what were the 
beliefs generally held at that date. There was prac- 
tical unanimity as to what was called " the essentials 
of Christian truth." Even the violent storms of con- 
troversy which swept over the surface of society did 
not disturb the beliefs which lay below. The " Chris- 
tian System" was quite sharply conceived. There 
were a few infidels who attacked it with clumsy op- 
position. There were a few Unitarians who sought to 
modify its theological statements in one particular. 
There were large numbers respectfully indifferent to 
it. But the System itself was conceived of alike by 
all. The everyday creed of the everyday man would 
have run something thus : 

" I believe that there is a God. 

" I believe that He made the world, out of nothing, 

149 



150 THE ROLE OF BELIEF 

by a series of fiats, in six natural days, four thousand 
and four years ago. 

" I believe that He made Adam and Eve out of the 
dust of the earth. 

" I believe that in Adam's fall we sinned all. 

" I believe that Jesus Christ, the second person of 
the Trinity offered Himself to the angry first person 
of the same Trinity to be a victim to appease the just 
wrath which could in no other way be satisfied. 

"I believe that by His suffering and death that 
wrath has been turned aside from such persons as will 
avail themselves of the substitute thus offered for 
them. 

" I believe that all those who do thus avail them- 
selves will go when they die to a heaven where they 
will be forever happy ; while those who do not avail 
themselves of it will be sent to hell where they will 
be forever miraculously kept alive so that they may 
endure endless torment. 

" I believe that if people are good they will be ever- 
lastingly rewarded, and that if they are bad, they will 
be everlastingly punished. 

" I believe all this because the Bible says so. 

" I believe the Bible because it is an inspired revela- 
tion of God's will and purpose concerning men." 

Concerning these articles there was practically no 
diversity of opinion. They were assumed almost as 
axioms. Superimposed upon these was a mass of dog- 
mas which were believed with almost equal unanimity. 



THE EOLE OF BELIEF 151 

The descent of the whole human race from a single 
pair of progenitors ; the universality of the Noachian 
Deluge; the immediate divine institution of the 
" Mosaic System " ; the literal fulfillment of the 
Prophecy ; the literal infallibility of the Bible. 

Above and beyond all these there was an indefinite 
mass of " denominational doctrines," ranging from the 
most exalted philosophical tenets, such as foreordina- 
tion, to the paltriest detail of denominational practice, 
such as the Amish tenet that hooks and eyes and not 
buttons ought to be used to fasten Christian men's 
clothes. 

This is a very bald but a true statement of the actual 
belief of the people of this country at the end of the 
first quarter of this century. Of course every item of 
this creed was challenged by somebody, but the thing 
to be noted is this : there were no other religious be- 
liefs generally extant. It is true that the Episcopa- 
lians kept on repeating their Apostles and iSTicene sym- 
bols, but there were few of them and even they, for 
the most part had for their week day and working 
doctrines about the same that other people had. 

Such was the theological situation in 1825. Any 
one who will take the trouble to read through piles of 
old sermons, tracts, controversial pamphlets, and such 
like can reconstruct it for himself. Another quarter 
century passed, and the peoples' beliefs remained un- 
changed. Still another passed bringing us to 1875, 
and signs of change begin to appear. The change 



152 THE EOLE OF BELIEF 

came much later in this country than in Europe. 
During the twenty years between 1850 and 1870 the 
people of this country had their minds and hearts filled 
with questions of another sort. They were in the 
shadow of the over gathering clouds of war, or they 
were dazed by its flashing lightning and rolling thun- 
der, or they were gathering themselves up slowly from 
the prostration in which the tempest left them. During 
this period their religion was largely emotional. It 
expressed itself in passionate cries to God the Deliv- 
erer. The immediate stress of living was so exacting 
that men had little energy and less inclination to ex- 
amine the contents of their faith. 

But forces had meanwhile begun to be dimly felt 
which were destined, during the quarter century now 
drawing to a close, to revolutionize the religious be- 
lief of the people. German students had begun that 
criticism of the Bible which has compelled not only a 
new definition of Inspiration but an altogether dif- 
ferent way of esteeming and using the sacred books. 
The new science of Geology had gone far enough to 
forecast the destruction of the accepted Biblical 
Chronology and to indefinitely expand each of the 
Creation Days. The new Historical Method had gone 
far enough to set the ancient Bible stories side by 
side with ancient legends. The Doctrine of Evo- 
lution had won its way so far as to compel a new defi- 
nition of Creation. The modern passion of philan- 
thropy had begun to modify the theology of the 



THE BOLE OE BELIEF 153 

Atonement by its deeper feeling of God's love and its 
higher estimate of man's worth. 

Few realize how profound and far reaching has 
been the revolution in religious belief during our own 
generation. Luther or Calvin, Anselm or Thomas, 
even Augustine or Pelagius, could they have come 
alive in 1850 and learned the English tongue would 
not have found anything strange or unintelligible in 
the religious speech of the people. But if they had 
postponed their revisitation until now they would 
find themselves hopelessly bewildered, they would 
find people treating as palpably false things which they 
assumed to be palpably true. They would find that 
man's conception of God and theology was changed 
because the conception of the universe and its science 
has changed. 

Who to-day believes that God created the universe 
in six natural days by immediate command ? or that 
Noah's Flood was universal ? or that the Holy Scrip- 
tures are a literal and infallible rescript of God's word ? 
or that the Hebrew System was delivered all in a piece 
to Moses ? Or that the work of Christ is to be ex- 
plained by calling it an equivalent in pain paid to 
cancel God's bond of justice ? 

We had better face the facts. The conditions of 
living are changed, and the change has come with 
amazing suddenness. On the physical side of life as 
great a change has occurred between the time of 
George Washington and to-day as between his time 



154 THE KOLE OF BELIEF 

and that of Cyrus. But life is of one piece. It is 
idle to suppose that it may be transformed in its arts, 
its mechanics, economics, science, ethics, and remain 
untouched in its religion. It is not to the point to de- 
clare at this stage with whatever solemnity that 
" Christ is the same yesterday, to-day, and forever." 
Of course He is. God is changeless. So is nature. 
But it does not follow that yesterday saw the whole 
of God ; or that the adjustments which it achieved to 
the side of God which it saw are the final ones. 



GOD, EVEN OUK GOD 



IX 

GOD, EVEN" OUR GOD 

The only starting-point to religious belief is the 
fact of the moral sense. The only means of transit 
from the closed ring of Nature to anything which 
may lie above, or outside of, or beneath Nature, is to 
be sought for here. The everyday man believes that 
the mandates of conscience are obligatory. The man- 
dates themselves may be confused or may be hurtful, 
judged from the standpoint of human good. They 
may be regarded or disregarded, obeyed or disobeyed, 
as the case may be. But the individual never really 
doubts that it speaks with authority. " "We ought to 
do this, we ought not to do that." These distinctions 
are felt to proceed from some source either within or 
without, which has a right to speak. The faculty by 
which one distinguishes between right and wrong is 
as obvious a fact as is the existence of the faculty by 
which one distinguishes between sweet and bitter. 
The power to distinguish is taken as sufficient evi- 
dence that the distinction itself is a real and valid 
one. What is the ground and origin of right and 
wrong ? Whoso holds the key to this will win the 
battle. It is admitted on all hands that the sense of 
right and wrong does exist. But the real question is 

157 



158 

whence comes it, and in what consists its binding 
force ? Some will reply " It is an original endowment 
vouchsafed to man by God, and is a possession pe- 
culiar to man." Many, on the other hand, assert and 
believe that it is a faculty which has been slowly de- 
veloped in man out of the interaction of himself and 
his fellows with their surroundings. In the crude 
barbarism which they conceive to be the original 
status of the race, certain actions were quickly found 
to tend to the general welfare, while certain other 
sorts of action were found to work detriment to the 
tribe. The first sort, of course, tended to popularity, 
and the second brought pain or danger to the indi- 
vidual producing them. The glow of self-satisfaction 
produced in the doer of helpful things encouraged 
him to a habit of such actions. Murder, theft, 
adultery, having been found to be dangerous to the 
community were warmly reprehended. This public 
sense of dislike to such deeds reacted upon the indi- 
vidual who felt it, and gradually became fixed in each 
one and was transmitted to his descendants. It had 
its origin in the public weal. Generations afterward 
it emerges as a permanent faculty which has lost its 
memory and changed its name. 

It is contended also that at least the rudiments of a 
moral sense are discernible in animals much below the 
rank of man. This opinion seems to be steadily gain- 
ing ground among those who have the right to an 
opinion on the subject. JSTo one can read the account 



GOD, EVEN OUR GOD 159 

of the patient experiments and observations conducted 
upon the lower animals by Mr. Darwin, Mr. Komane, 
or Sir John Lubbock, without being impressed with 
the feeling that the actions of the animals which they 
describe are not different in kind from the actions of 
men which are determined upon by means of the moral 
sense. This conviction has caused grave disquiet in 
the minds of many religious people. It seems at first 
sight to break down the last barrier of distinction be- 
tween man and beast. It appears to degrade the con- 
science from its high status as the voice of God to the 
unreasonable instincts of the brute. I think the dis- 
quiet is unwarranted. Whatever may be the final de- 
cision as to the origin of the moral faculty, the really 
important thing to be considered is the fact of its 
present existence. Is the validity of my decision be- 
tween the morality of two actions rendered any the 
less trustworthy because my dog is capable of making 
decisions which seem to spring from the same motive ? 
The reply is, They arc no less trustworthy than are 
the deliverances of my mathematical faculty although 
a crow is competent to count three. Whatever the 
faculty shall be seen to come from, or, — to speak more 
accurately, — by whatever method God has brought it 
into being, the faculty is here, and men do trust it. 
That is sufficient. But why do they trust it ? Why 
is right bounden and wrong banned ? It can only be 
because there is some fundamental and eternal dis- 
tinction to which the moral faculty makes its appeal. It 



160 

seems to me as unreasonable to think that the faculty 
of conscience should have been developed if there be 
no objective fact for it to deal with, as it would be to 
suppose that the faculty of sight should have been de- 
veloped if there were no such thing in the physical 
universe as light. The conscience leads to something. 
But to what ? The general reply is " To God." But 
really one is not very much farther along when he has 
made this reply, for the question at once comes up 
"What does one mean by God." Here is where a 
confusion exists which renders valueless an enormous 
amount of thought and speech concerning religion. 
It is thoughtlessly assumed that all who say " God " 
mean by it the same thing, that God is a well defined 
object, like the sun, for example, and that whenever 
His name is spoken the word connotes the same thing 
for all men. No mistake could be greater. It is 
probably the fact that no two men now and within 
Christendom have in mind precisely the same thing 
when they use the word " God." And it is still more 
evident that the use of this word has changed enor- 
mously during the progress of the centuries past. In 
understanding the Bible for example, much perplexity 
would be avoided if this simple fact were borne in 
mind. It is true, of course, that the God of Abraham, 
Isaac and Jacob, — the God of the living and the dead, 
— is in His own person unchangeable. But it does not 
follow that Abraham's conception of God was the 
same as Jacob's, or that Jacob's was the same as 



GOD, EVEN OUR GOD 161 

Isaiah's, or that Isaiah's was the same as that of St. 
Paul. One has only to read the earlier parts of the 
Old Testament to see that the naive conceptions of 
Jehovah which were entertained by those who wor- 
shipped Him were such as would be now unsatisfac- 
tory even for a Christian child. To their thought He 
was the God of gods. But the gods over whom He was 
supreme were thought of by them as actually existing 
personages. Their God was conceived of as differing 
from these in certain things, but also as like to them 
in many other things. Says Professor Piepenbring : 

" They represented Him to themselves under the 
form of man. According to the Biblical narratives 
God visits Abraham with two companions ; He accepts 
the hospitality that the patriarch offers Him ; He con- 
verses with him and Sarah, then goes away toward 
Sodom, accompanied b} r His host, to Avhom, on the 
way, He makes known His purpose to destroy the 
guilty cities. He forms man out of the dust of the 
ground, as an artist would do; He breathes into his 
nostrils the breath of life; He plants a garden in 
Eden ; He takes a rib of the man to make the woman, 
and carefully closes up the flesh in place of it ; He 
rests from the work of creation when He has finished 
it. After the fall He appears in the garden of Eden ; 
He walks through it ; He calls Adam and Eve ; He 
informs them of the penalties that will overtake them ; 
then He makes them garments of skin and clothes 
them. He closes the door of the ark upon Noah. 
He smells the pleasant odor of the burnt-offering that 
the latter offers Him. He engages in a hand-to-hand 
conflict, like a man, with Jacob. He attacks Moses 
in the night and attempts to kill him ; He speaks to 
him as one person to another ; He buries him after his 
death ; He pronounces the ten words of the decalogue, 



162 

and engraves them on tables of stone. He raises His 
hand to take an oath. It is only necessary to read a 
few pages of the prophets or the Psalms to be con- 
vinced that God is regarded as possessing all the mem- 
bers and functions of the human body. He is even 
said to hiss, to cry, to laugh, to sleep and awake. 

"It is clear that in the prophets and the Psalms 
these expressions belong to the poetic style. But 
originally, and even at a later date in the mouth of 
the people, they were not merely rhetorical • they cor- 
responded to the imperfect ideas that were current re- 
specting the Deity. When the narratives of the Pen- 
tateuch, from which we have taken the examples 
above cited, were composed, they were taken in their 
literal signification. We think that even at the time 
when the original narrators borrowed them from 
popular tradition to stereotype them in writing, they 
were still generally taken in this sense." 

It required two thousand years for the Hebrew 
people to work out its conception of God. That proc- 
ess was for them, as it is for all people at all times, 
at once a discovery and a revelation. God's revela- 
tion of Himself always lies open before the eyes of all 
men. Nevertheless, He is hid from all men until 
they discover Him for themselves. God teaches men 
religion as wise men teach their children knowledge. 
That is, they put their children in the way to learn for 
themselves. The obstacle in the way of imparting all 
knowledge, whether by the Father in heaven or the fa- 
ther on earth is not that he does not possess the knowl- 
edge, but that the pupil can only take it in and make 
it his own by his own labor, thought and experience. 
The Old Testament is the fragmentary and incomplete 



163 

record of the multitudinous ways in which the men of 
old felt after God if haply they might find Him, 
though He was not far from every one of them. In 
his " God and the Bible " Mr. Matthew Arnold has 
traced this process and well summed up its result. 
Probably no man will do it better or more truly for 
many a day to come. In his well-known phrase " A 
Power, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness," 
he sums up the faith of Israel. Unfortunately he 
stops at that point, forgetting that the Christian 
world has passed immeasurably beyond that formula. 
" God, who in times past, in divers parts and in 
sundry manners spake by the prophets, hath in the 
last days spoken by His Son." 

But Mr. Matthew Arnold is not the only Christian 
man who stops content with the Hebrew God. Most 
of the confusion and doubtfulness into which the 
Christian world has fallen would have been avoided if 
the God of popular belief had come to be the God of 
our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. I am led to be- 
lieve that the God of popular thought is the God of the 
Hebrews, and not even their truest thought of Him. 
He is an oriental potentate, the King of Kings and 
Lord of Lords. He sits upon a throne in some remote 
heavenly palace, magnifical exceedingly, but far, far 
away. He is the Supreme Kuler, who conducts the 
affairs of the universal empire, administers justice, ex- 
alts and casts down, rewards and punishes according 
to his own arbitrary decrees. Says Mr. John Fiske : 



164 GOD, EVEN OUR GOD 

" I remember distinctly the conception which I had 
formed when five years of age. I imagined a narrow 
office just over the zenith, with a tall standing-desk 
running lengthwise, upon which lay several open 
ledgers bound in coarse leather. There was no roof 
over this office, and the walls rose scarcely five feet 
from the floor, so that a person standing at the desk 
could look out upon the whole world. There were 
two persons at the desk, and one of them — a tall, 
slender man, of aquiline features, wearing spectacles, 
with a pen in his hand and another behind his ear — 
was God. The other, whose appearance I do not dis- 
tinctly recall, was an attendant angel. Both were 
diligently watching the deeds of men and recording 
them in the ledgers. To my infant mind this picture 
was not grotesque, but ineffably solemn, and the fact 
that all my words and acts were thus written down, 
to confront me at the day of judgment, seemed natur- 
ally a matter of grave concern. 

" If we could cross-question all the men and women 
we know, and still more all the children, we should 
probably find that, even in this enlightened age, the 
conceptions of Deity current throughout the civilized 
world contain much that is in the crudent sense an- 
thropomorphic. Such, at any rate, seems to be the 
character of the conceptions with which we start in 
life, although in those whose studies lead them to 
ponder upon the subject in the light of enlarged ex- 
perience, these conceptions become greatly modified." 

I incline to think that the conception of God which 
has been until lately generally current, is derived 
from the Hebrew prophets, from the habit of thought 
and speech which belong to monarchy, from Milton 
and Dante, and but little from Moses or St. Paul. Until 
lately this conception of God produced no intellectual 
distress. It satisfied the sense of reverence, it stirred 



GOD, EVEN OUR GOD 165 

a feeling of awe, it provided potent sanctions for con- 
duct. But it did all these because it fitted in with 
the accepted ideas concerning nature and man. 
" God " and " Nature " are correlative terms. They 
must be adjusted to one another. If anything occurs 
to seriously modify the contents of either term the 
equation is thrown out of joint. Doubt, distress, per- 
plexity must prevail until the equilibrium shall be 
restored. This is precisely what has occurred. 
Within a generation has transpired the greatest men- 
tal revolution within the history of human thought. 
The whole conception of Nature has been trans- 
formed. Its origin, its laws, its methods, its goal, are 
thought of from a new standpoint. But as a conse- 
quence the old idea of God and the new idea of Na- 
ture are out of joint. Nature has been rationalized, 
Christianized, but the popular God remains the He- 
brew Yaveh. 

This change in the situation has been powerfully 
hastened, if not produced, by the spread of the 
doctrine of Evolution. The popular thought about 
God is in process of change. Until lately men 
thought of Him as having His seat at some re- 
mote and inaccessible region in space and time. 
From there He emerged at a definite point in the past 
and caused a universe to be where before emptiness 
had been. During a "Creative Week" He labored 
like a cunning artificer, finished His work, pronounced 
it very good, rested and withdrew. Orthodoxy was 



166 

alarmed and indignant when first called upon to ex- 
pand these creative days, first into centuries, and 
then into aeons. It piques itself upon having been 
able to effect this extension without disaster to itself. 
But the average educated man has since some time 
abandoned this way of thinking altogether. He has 
come to believe that time with God is all of one 
piece, that He works continually, and that He works 
not from without but from within, that He is not re- 
mote or apart from the universe and never has been, 
that He is in and behind and through all things, proc- 
esses and forces, not identified with them, but ap- 
prehensible apart from them. So far as men are now 
theistic they think of God immanent. That is to say, 
they do so in every sphere except the sphere of 
technical Theology. But the formulated Theology of 
"Western Christendom was builded about the other 
mode of conceiving God. The decrees of Councils 
have this in common, they think of a transcendent 
and not an immanent God. The Evolutionary phil- 
osophy can only conceive of God immanent. It 
thinks of Him as bearing, in a way, the same relation 
to the universe that the soul does to the body. The 
soul is not the body, nor is it the product of the body, 
nor is it to be thought of as ceasing with the destruc- 
tion of the body. But it is, so far as we can know, 
conditioned in its manifestation upon the body. So 
men are steadily coming to think concerning God. 
They can no longer think of Him as " coming " to the 



167 

universe as from a distance. No more do they 
identify Him with the universe. They see that in 
His essence He must transcend the universe as mind 
transcends matter. But they see Him in the universe 
or they do not see Him at all. They are impatient of 
the little definitions of the little catechisms which de- 
scribe Him as "a spirit, infinite, eternal and un- 
changeable in being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, 
goodness and truth." Possibly they have no better 
definition to offer, but only a more reverent silence. 
Nevertheless, they must think of Him in terms which 
fit with their thought of Nature. Probably Mr. 
Fiske in his luminous little book on " The Idea of 
God," has said it as well as the current thought about 
God is likely to be said for a long time to come. 

It may as well be confessed that this way of con- 
ceiving God is unsatisfactory to many and irritating 
to not a few. It is not nearly so clearly cut, sharply 
defined and easily presentable in thought as the one 
which it supersedes. That one is simple, portable, al- 
ways available for the practical needs of teacher or 
exhorter. It is charged against this one that it is 
vague, elusive, and in places inconsistent. To this 
charge two retorts are possible. The first is, this is 
the God of St. John, St. Paul and Jesus. The second 
is, it is better to conceive vaguely of a true God than 
precisely of a false one. But the fact remains that a 
man born and reared under the evolutionary way of 
thinking about God, man, and nature, — that way which 



168 GOD, EVEN OUR GOD 

has possession of the centres of learning, which is in 
the text-books of public schools, and which colors pop- 
ular speech, — can no more rest content with the cur- 
rent notion of God than he could present Him under 
the figure of Buddha or the " oiled and curled Assyrian 
Bull." Science is slowly but firmly escorting that 
simulacrum of a divinity to the frontiers of the uni- 
verse. God is not the mighty ruler sitting upon a re- 
mote throne outside nature, making incalculable in- 
cursions from thence within its realms, and retiring 
again to the high seat. We do not ask who shall as- 
cend into heaven and bring Him down, or who shall 
descend into the abyss to bring Him up. For we know 
that He is most nigh. " Closer is He than breathing, 
and nearer than hands or feet." Shall we thrust Him 
farther away in order that we may distinguish His out- 
lines more closely ? Shall we not rather go on serenely, 
unmindful of the scorn of those who so adore definite- 
ness of doctrine that they will worship no God that 
cannot be defined ? 

"Oh where is the sea," the fishes cried? 

As they swam the crystal clearness through ; 
" We've heard from of old of the ocean's tide, 

And we long to look on the waters blue. 
The wise ones speak of an infinite sea, 

Oh who can tell us if such there be? " 

The lark flew up in the morning bright, 
And sung and balanced on sunny wings ; 

And this was its song ; "I see the light ; 
I look on a world of beautiful things ; 

But flying and singing everywhere 
In vain I searched to find the air." 



THE NEW SITUATION 



X 

THE NEW SITUATION 

We are confronted with a situation. Practically 
all under forty years of age have been educated under 
the domination of the ]New Learning. Their teachers 
and their text-books have been for the most part silent 
concerning religious belief. When they have not been 
silent they have been Agnostic. The newspapers, 
magazines, periodicals which they read give but little 
space to the discussions of religious problems. When 
they do deal with these it is usually to point out some 
alleged incompatibility of religion and science, or to 
harmonize some such antagonism. So it has come 
about that this is characterized as an " Age of Doubt." 
It would be more accurate to characterize it as an age 
of uncertainty, hesitation, perplexity. For doubt in 
the realm of religion usually carries a connotation of 
antagonism. That is not the mark of the doubt of to- 
day. It is not so much doubt as doubtfulness. The 
steadily deepening moral earnestness has brought mul- 
titudes to be at once more willing and less able to re- 
tain many things " which have been most steadfastly 
believed amongst us." Take them altogether, people 
were never so well disposed to believe the truths of 
Christianity, and never so perplexed as to precisely 

171 



172 THE NEW SITUATION 

what those truths are. There is a widespread distaste 
for what is called dogma. Doctrinal sermons are lis- 
tened to with impatience, if hearkened to at all. Doc- 
trinal treatises have no charm for the multitude. 
Time was when they had. "When one looks over faded 
pamphlets which preserve the sermons to which mul- 
titudes of people eagerly listened half a century ago, 
his wonder is not at their inconclusiveness, but their 
dullness. But they did not seem dull then. Why do 
they now ? 

Rightly or wrongly, the impression is abroad that 
Christ has been lost in Christianity. The person has 
been hidden by the theology. The truth has been over- 
laid and obscured by the creeds. The cry of the 
time is " Back to Christ." The titles of the books 
which serious-minded persons are reading are but vari- 
ations upon this theme. But who is this Jesus ? What 
does He stand for ? What does His life signify ? The 
reply to these questions must needs constitute a creed. 
Why then not take the dogmas which have been so la- 
boriously constructed by the Church in the ages past, 
press them upon the people, fortify them by argument, 
defend them against opposition, prove them by Scrip- 
ture, and so bring men to belief ? I reply, because the 
thing is impossible. It is true that many think it is 
possible. They would reply to questions by more 
strenuous assertion. " Dogma the Antidote for Doubt," 
is the happy title of a treatise by a venerable bishop 
who may be taken as the representative of those who 



THE NEW SITUATION 173 

are of his way of thinking. But the world's reply, 
while in its present mood, is in the words of Henry 
"Ward Beecher, " Dogma is the skin of truth stuffed 
and set up in a museum." 

The time is certainly fitting for the modest attempt 
here made, that is, to disentangle those beliefs which 
are fundamental and essential from those which are 
secondary, incidental or paltry. The everyday man 
stands appalled and disheartened at what he has come 
to think the complexity of the articles of the Christian 
Faith. He is urged to believe, but then he is urged to 
believe so many things that he hesitates, not so much 
at their difficulty as at their mass. A few years ago 
that monster of learning, the Kev. Dr. Schaff, essayed 
the task of gathering together and printing " The 
Creeds of Christendom." Three great octavo volumes 
of nearly a thousand pages each were the result of the 
attempt. Many of them are now unintelligible. Still 
more are obsolete. But the impression left upon the 
mind of the average man who sees the work is that 
Christian truth is an enormously complex and difficult 
thing. When he observes farther that each Confession 
of Faith is repudiated by the adherents of all the other 
confessions, he is led to ask in the temper of Pilate 
"What is Truth?" Now if such a man could be 
brought to see that these highly elaborated systems 
are but the personal opinions of individuals at differ- 
ent times throughout the Christian centuries, and that 
they are of no obligation except such as their intrinsic 



174: THE NEW SITUATION 

reasonableness may carry, he will feel a great sense 
of relief. Mr. Huxley very properly resented an ex- 
pression used by Principal Wace in a controversy with 
him. " The word infidel, perhaps, carries an unpleas- 
ant significance. Perhaps it is right that it should. 
It is and ought to be an unpleasant thing for a man to 
have to say plainly that he does not believe." 

Fair-minded men will side with Mr. Huxley. 
Whether belief should have praise, or disbelief odium, 
depends altogether upon what the thing is for which 
belief is asked. Most men to-day are believers, un- 
believers, doubters and seekers, all at once. They 
have a right to ask of the Christian Church, — What, 
precisely, are the things for which you ask credence ? 
and, How far is membership in your society dependent 
upon assent to those things ? 

What has Church membership to do with belief in 
doctrine ? It is right to say at this point that I approach 
this question from the point of view and with the pre- 
possessions of a member of the Protestant Episcopal 
Church, or as we prefer to think of it, the Anglo- 
Catholic Church. The general attitude of this Church 
toward Doctrine is one which is a puzzle to multitudes 
outside, and often little understood, even by her own 
members. The contribution which this Church has 
to make toward clearing up the religious perplexities 
of the time is not any neat, coherent, bundle of 
dogmas, but a practical method of dealing with 
dogmas. This is really the feature of that Church 



THE NEW SITUATION 175 

which ought to arrest attention. For instance, she 
includes in her membership and in her Ministr}^ those 
who, so far as doctrine is concerned, are Calvinists and 
Armenians, believers in the Keal presence and Zwing- 
lians, believers in the Yerbal Inspiration and those 
who regard the Bible as literature, believers in Eternal 
punishment, and Universalists, Evolutionists and 
special Creationists. All these, and men with all sorts 
and shades of prepossessions and beliefs, dwell to- 
gether in the same ecclesiastical society and with 
rare exceptions, no one ever thinks of questioning an- 
other man's right of citizenship. This practical 
policy is the rational outcome of her fundamental 
conception of what the Church of Christ is. She be- 
lieves it to be, like the State, an ordinance of God for 
all men. The condition of membership in it must 
therefore be easy and simple. It is meant to be 
Christ's Institute of Eighteousness. It must be 
easily accessible to sinners — intellectual as well as 
moral sinners. Any condition of membership which 
she might make would be null and void in so far as 
they go beyond the conditions which the Master has 
laid down. It is only on this ground that member- 
ship in the Church can be pressed on any one as a duty. 
The policy of the Eoman Church is, as we believe, 
indefensible, because she urges Church membership as 
a duty, while she at the same time erects conditions 
which are intellectually intolerable. Protestantism, 
on the other hand, has multiplied the doctrinal condi- 



176 THE NEW SITUATION 

tions precedent so enormously, that it has practically 
ceased to insist upon Church membership as a duty, 
and only offers it as a privilege to a select few. That 
this is the situation is easily discovered. Let a 
stranger who is willing and anxious to cooperate with 
the Christian Society and to join in her Sacraments, 
but who says frankly that he does not believe in the 
dogmas of Papal Infallibility, or the Immaculate 
Conception, ask for Confirmation at the hands of 
a Eoman Bishop, and see whether or not he will be 
received ? Let the same man apply for membership 
in a Protestant Church, saying at the same time that 
he does not believe in the Inspiration of the Bible, or 
generally in the particular Confession of Faith about 
which that denomination is organized, and see whether 
he will be admitted ? It is not at all to the point to 
inquire whether these doctrines alluded to are true or 
untrue. The point is that a Church is acting ultra 
vires when it makes any such beliefs a condition of 
membership, or of admission to its Ministry. Any 
one who is a disciple of Christ has a right to mem- 
bership in His Church. However feeble his belief, 
however erroneously he may conceive of Christ's 
power, however he may stand in need of instruction 
and development, he has a right to membership in the 
Society. He is not called upon to seek it as a favor. 
He stands to the Church as he does to the State. One's 
political opinions may be ever so wrong, or ever so op- 
posed to those generally held by the people of his own 



THE NEW SITUATION 177 

country, but he may not be outlawed for opinions. 
He can only be refused citizenship or be disfranchised 
for conduct. 

This is the view of the Church, practically, though 
not very consistently acted upon by the Anglo-Cath- 
olic Church. It is greatly to be desired that the 
" Club " idea of the Church should be dislodged from 
the popular mind. " What must I believe if I join 
your Church ? " is the way the ordinary man speaks. 
" If he don't believe what his Church holds he ought 
to get out of it," is the way the newspaper expresses 
the popular notion. But apply the same theory to 
citizenship in the State, and one sees its absurdity. If 
the Church be a divine institute in which membership 
is obligatory upon every disciple of Christ, then no 
conditions can be made, or should be regarded if made, 
save those which He Himself laid down. The unpar- 
donable offence of dogma is when it thrusts itself into 
a place of authority to which it has no title. The 
question is not concerning its truth or falsity, but its 
function. This Church repudiates the claim of author- 
ity for all dogmatic statements which go beyond the 
range of recognized facts. The facts upon which 
Christianity is based she believes to be real facts, and 
its phenomena real phenomena, but the relation of 
these to each other and to the new truth constantly 
being uncovered, are open to be constantly re-stated 
in the language of successive generations. When tra- 
ditional statements cease to be intelligible they be- 



178 THE NEW SITUATION 

come to all practical concern, false. If they be still 
insisted upon they become stumbling stones and rocks 
of offence. It is distressingly apparent that this has 
come to be the fact. 

" The religious world is given to a strange delusion. 
It fondly imagines that it possesses a monopoly of 
serious and constant reflection upon the terrible prob- 
lems of existence ; and that those who cannot accept its 
shibboleths are either mere Galios caring for none of 
these things, or libertines desiring to escape from the 
restraint of morality. It does not appear to have 
entered the imaginations of these people that outside 
their pale, and firmly resolved not to enter it, there 
are thousands of men, — certainly not their inferiors in 
capacity, character, or knowledge of the questions at 
issue, — who estimate the purely spiritual elements of 
the Christian faith as highly as they do, but who have 
nothing to do with the Christian Churches, because in 
their profession of belief on the evidence offered, 
would be simply immoral." l 

It is not wise to dismiss this as a railing accusation 
brought by an adversary. It is a mere statement of 
fact made by a man who had a trick of knowing facts 
when he saw them. Moreover, what he says is true. 

" I certainly believe that there are many more un- 
polished diamonds hidden in the churchless mass of 
humanity than the church-going part of the com- 
munity has any idea of. I am even disposed to think 
1 Huxley : Science and Christian Tradition, Appleton, p. 140. 



THE NEW SITUATION 179 

that a great and steadily increasing portion of the 
moral worth of society lies outside of the Church, 
separated from it not by Godlessness, but rather by 
exceptionally intense moral earnestness. Many, in 
fact, have left the Church in order to be Christians." 

It may be well at this point to call attention to 
what we mean by belief. The formula is, " I believe." 
We do not say " I know." We do not know. Not a 
few are needlessly distressed because while they can 
demonstrate the reality of what they believe in other 
spheres, they cannot altogether state the ground of 
their religious beliefs, or convince others of their re- 
ality. It is one thing for one to be able to give a 
reason for the hope which is in him, and quite a dif- 
ferent thing to make another man believe the same 
thing. The best that one can attain to in this region 
is the possession of " a reasonable, religious and holy 
hope." If a man can but justify to himself the es- 
sential reasonableness of his beliefs, it is enough. But 
this justification is reached only to a very limited ex- 
tent through processes of logic. Emotion, affection, 
experience, are quite as potent, and quite as legit- 
imate agents as reason. Doctrine is nothing more 
than the attempt to express belief in terms of the un- 
derstanding. 

That is the reason of the adoption of the method 
which I have determined to follow. The attempt 
has often been made to take the articles of the Cath- 
olic Creed one by one and establish them in the court 



180 THE NEW SITUATION 

of reason. Classical instances of this sort are such as 
" Pearson, on the Creed," and " Liddon, on the Di- 
vinity of Jesus Christ." Such arguments have a place 
and use. They clarify and fortify belief in those 
where it is already present. But it is to be greatly 
doubted whether they have ever produced belief 
where it is lacking. What I seek is at once more mod- 
est and more difficult. I would induce belief in those 
who are hesitating, doubtful, perplexed, and unable 
to believe. To do this one must commence with an 
appeal to those realities which come within the 
everyday experience of the everyday man. If these 
experiences, when drawn out into consciousness and 
formulated in intelligible propositions, should show 
even a likeness to the statements of the Catholic 
Creeds, it will be just so much gain to the Truth 
and to the Church. 



NATUKE AND GOD 



XI 

NATTTKE AND GOD 

To what then are we as Christians and as Church- 
men committed ? I reply, in general, we are com- 
mitted to a belief in the reality of religious phe- 
nomena. That is to say, we believe that the facts 
and forces which we talk about and claim to deal 
with in our religious life, are real facts and real 
forces, that they are not mere sentiments or ideas to 
which no objective facts correspond. We hold them 
to be something far more than creations of fear and 
figments of fancy, or formless clouds of emotion. 
When we speak such words as " God," " Duty," 
" Kevelation," " Providence," " Immortality," " Eter- 
nal Life," we believe that we are handling real things 
and not imaginary things. This is really the point 
at which the religious man and the non-religious man 
diverge. The latter shuts himself within what he 
calls "Nature," while the former claims both the 
right and the power to step outside this circle and to 
move in a region which he still calls natural, but 
which the non-religious man calls " supernatural." It 
ought to be said in passing that this antithesis of 
natural and supernatural is, strictly speaking, illegit- 
imate. The actual antithesis is between the real and 

183 



184 NATURE AND GOD 

the unreal. Whatever is is natural. In the plane where 
it has its existence its very being vindicates its natu- 
ralness. The fundamental question about that whole 
set of phenomena which are called supernatural is not 
" Do they exist outside of Nature ? " but " Do they 
exist at all ? " This is the crux. 

There are two ways at present current of thinking 
about the universe : One of them is the way which 
is familiar to religion, and the other to science. Per- 
haps the scientific way will be called to mind more 
vividly by a simple mention of a few of its repre- 
sentative names than by an attempt to define it. 
There are two or three such names which have been 
heard now for nearly a generation from the pulpit, 
and in the religious press, and in all discussions about 
religion, until their very mention may provoke a 
smile. The reason why the names of Huxley, and 
Tyndal, and Spencer have been so frequently used is 
not so much on account of what the intrinsic force of 
what they have said or written, but rather because 
they stand as convenient symbols to represent a way 
of looking at things. This way Mr. Balfour has called 
" Naturalism." 

That general conception of the universe is, roughly, 
that actual existence ends with those things, facts, and 
forces which either come within the perception of the 
senses, or can be logically derived therefrom. Nat- 
uralism takes its stand in the centre of a wide circle. 
That circle includes within it Nature, to the utmost 



NATURE AND GOD 185 

conceivable limit of space. Within that ring it con- 
ceives to be at work a complex machinery of matter 
and force. Whether there be any existence within 
this circle which science cannot deal with, it does not 
pretend to say. What it alleges is that when men 
keep to the field of Nature their feet are upon the 
ground and they move with a sense of security. It 
approves of the dictum of Kant that existence is an 
island, shut up within Nature as in intangible bar- 
riers. It is the country of truth, but it is surrounded 
by a broad and stormy ocean, the proper place of illu- 
sion, where many a fog bank, and many an ice-berg 
give false promise of new countries, incessantly de- 
ceiving mariners, who are ambitious of new discovery, 
with mighty hopes, and involving them in adventures 
which can never be abandoned, and yet which can 
never be concluded. This naturalistic way of regard- 
ing existence has come to be very common. Within 
a generation the frontiers of nature have been almost 
immeasurably extended. Places where mystery 
lurked once, have now been illuminated bj the search- 
light of science. The result has been to create what 
may be called credulity as toward the natural, and 
skepticism as toward the supernatural. It is more a 
temper or disposition of mind in the community than 
an intelligent or reasoned conviction. Nevertheless, 
it exists, and indeed, is the outstanding fact with 
which the religious man has to deal. It is by no 
means confined to scholars or scientific men. The 



186 NATURE AND GOD 

business man, the professional man, the mechanic, are 
all alike under its influence. They say, " "When we 
are dealing with the things of Nature we feel sure 
about them ; when we are asked to consider the things 
of another world, we are unable to think or act with 
certitude." 

We who are Christians feel the force of this very 
keenly. We, too, are under the influences of the 
spirit of the Age. Nevertheless, we have convictions 
concerning the unseen things which are quite as deep 
and real, and affect our practical conduct as much as 
do our beliefs in the reality of the things which we 
touch, and taste, and handle. How then, shall the 
Christian believer who is not a fanatic or dreamer, or 
idealist, justify, — not alone to the world about him, 
but to himself, — the existence of his faith ? We be- 
lieve in existence in two planes. We believe that they 
are both equally natural. We have in mind that they 
are apprehended by different methods and that they 
operate in different ways, but we insist upon their 
actual existence. How shall we adjust our religious 
belief to our scientific creed ? 

Several methods have been tried with very unsatis- 
factory results. One of them is to apportion existence 
into two provinces over one of which Reason rules 
and over the other Faith. Says Mr. Balfour : 

"This method consists in setting up side by side 
with the creed of natural science, another and supple- 
mentary set of beliefs which minister to the needs and 



NATURE AND GOD 187 

aspirations which science cannot meet, and which may 
speak amid silence which science is powerless to 
break. The natural world and the spiritual world are 
in this view each of them real, and each of them ob- 
jects of real knowledge. But the laws of the natural 
world are revealed to us by the discoveries of science, 
while the laws of the spiritual world are revealed 
through the authority of inspired witnesses, or di- 
vinely guided institutions. The two regions of knowl- 
edge lie side by side, and contiguous, but not con- 
nected, like empires of different races and language, 
which own no common jurisdiction, nor hold any in- 
tercourse with each other, except along a disputed and 
wavering frontier." 

This method has attractions for very many, but is 
not without the gravest practical difficulties. It calls 
upon Eeason to deal with natural facts and upon 
Faith to deal with spiritual facts. It sets these two 
powers of the soul over against each other. It pro- 
poses to parcel out the universe between them. It re- 
sents as an intrusion the entrance of either one of 
these faculties into the domain of the other. It thinks 
that for this world the wisest mode of procedure is to 
open one's eyes and keep one's mouth shut, while the 
proper attitude toward the facts of the other world is 
to shut one's eyes and open one's mouth and swallow 
whatever faith may place within it. The trouble with 
this scheme is that human nature is all of one piece. 
Reason and Faith are not two separate faculties like 
hearing and seeing, taking cognizance of different 
class of phenomena. Each one of them is the action 
of the whole personality. If the religious faculty be 



188 NATUKE AND GOD 

nothing better than credulity plus hysterics, its de- 
liverance will neither be responsible nor respected. 
All that any man really believes must be capable 
of being brought into some unity. The human 
soul must always experience a feeling of distress 
at any attempt to create within it a perpetual schism. 
Naturalism and orthodoxy are alike ill-advised when 
they insist upon this division of territory. What we 
call faith cannot be done without by a scientific in- 
vestigator. What we call science cannot be done 
without by a believer. As Mr. Balfour again says 
" there are many persons, and they are increasing in 
number, who find it difficult or impossible to acquiesce 
in this division of the ' Whole ' of knowledge into two 
or more unconnected fragments. Naturalism may be 
practically unsatisfactory, but at least the positive 
teaching of Naturalism has secured general assent, 
and it shakes every instinct for unity to be asked to 
patch and plaster this accepted creed with a number 
of propositions drawn from an entirely different source 
and on behalf of which no such common agreement 
can be claimed." 

Nor has Professor Drummond's effort to confuse 
the natural and the spiritual worlds been more satis- 
factory. At first sight one is likely to be taken 
by the brilliancy of his argument. A more careful 
reading, however, usually leaves upon one the impres- 
sion that he has reached his conclusions by means of 
the ambiguity of his definitions. 



NATURE AND GOD 189 

Here then is the situation : We move within the 
ring of naturalism. Its diameter has been enormously 
extended. In space its frontier has passed out of view 
beyond where old Bootes leads his leash or Sagit- 
tarius draws his bow in the South. In depth it pene- 
trates below the deepest discovery of microscopic life. 
In height it overarches and essays to include within 
it the moral sense of man. But at every point where 
one approaches it with the desire to escape its bound- 
aries, he finds himself confronted with the legend 
"No thoroughfare." 

Is there any divine voice? Is mere interpenetrat- 
ing it any divine energy ? How shall one pass from 
the things which are seen to the things which are un- 
seen ? As we have observed, one cannot send Faith 
out in quest of discoveries while Reason stays at home 
and manages the affairs of the household. Where 
then shall we seek for the path of exit from Nature 
and of entrance into Religion ? It would seem to be 
plain enough that if any such gate is discoverable it 
must be one which can be discerned from the side of 
Nature. 

Of course there is a conception of divine revelation 
which is not disturbed by the present situation. It 
thinks of God as coining from the outside, of His own 
motion, and by arbitrary methods, breaking into 
the territor\/ of the natural for the purpose of pro- 
claiming His truth. The part of humanity has been 
and is to sit still and ay ait. God will rend the 



190 NATURE AND GOD 

heavens and come down. Men have but to hearken 
and do. This conception is eminently simple, but un- 
fortunately the facts of nature and of revelation are 
against it. God has found men only when men have 
sought God. Revelation and discovery are reverse 
and obverse. If God is to reveal Himself He must be 
sought for. But where? And how? Along what 
path shall one travel, and what shall he accept as his 
guide ? 

The consensus of the religious world has practically 
agreed here. The wicket gate which leads out into 
the celestial country is Conscience. 



EVOLUTION AND GOD 



XII 

EVOLUTION AND GOD 

Twenty years ago my attention was for the first 
time seriously engaged with the doctrine of Evolu- 
tion. Up to that time I had thought of it, in a gen- 
eral way, as being a proper theme for jesting. I had 
contributed my poor quota of jokes upon the Dar- 
winians who " sought their ancestors in the zoological 
garden instead of the Garden of Eden." I had 
thought that a sufficient answer to the Theory, for 
practical men, was to be found in the fact that 
monkeys have tails and men do not. 

But the rapid spread of the theory, and its sober 
entertainment by men of whose sanity, at any rate, I 
could not doubt, led me to look at it more seriously. 
For several years thereafter, I devoted what time I 
could spare from the duties of a parish priest in a 
country cure to the reading of every available book 
which had up to that time appeared in French or 
English bearing with any directness upon the subject. 
It seemed to me then, as it seems to me now, that 
whether true or false, the theory must have the closest 
possible relation to my religion. 

When I first came to see what the theory involved, 
it seemed incompatible with my Christianity, or, in- 

193 



194 EVOLUTION AND GOD 

deed, with the honest possession of any religious faith 
whatever. My mind revolted against it. It appeared 
to me to be one of those strange mental crazes which 
Bishop Butler thought could now and then envelop a 
generation in the same way that a temporary insanity 
sometimes seizes upon an individual. The theory 
seemed to me to be unworthy of man and to leave no 
place for God. It was apparently without sufficient 
proof for its alleged facts. It appeared practically 
dangerous to persons and to society in that it trans- 
ferred duty to a new, untried, and insecure basis. It 
seemed to dethrone all familiar and intrenched au- 
thority for conduct, and to leave those who sincerely 
accepted it free from the sanctions which I conceived 
to be necessary to insure righteousness. 

Since then, like most intelligent men of our genera- 
tion, I have read and thought much upon the same 
theme. Indeed, it would be impossible for any one 
whose life brings him in contact with the movements 
of thought, to be untouched by that idea which is 
now, and has been for more than twenty years, the 
dominant one. 

The result has been that familiarity insensibly re- 
moved the horror which its strangeness caused me. 
"Now, I have come to accept it as being in the main 
true ; and I have found that it does not produce at all 
the effect upon my religious faith or morals, or those 
of others who receive it, which I apprehended. Such 
a reversal of judgment, made soberly and deliberately, 



EVOLUTION AND GOD 195 

is something which a man must justify to himself. 
From a somewhat extensive and intimate acquaint- 
ance among clergymen, I have found that the number 
of those who have passed through a similar experi- 
ence is very large. I have, therefore, made my " con- 
fession," because I know that in the main I speak for 
many besides myself. 

I do not stop now to define the doctrine of Evolu- 
tion. Any one who does not know what it is cannot 
be told in the compass of an essay. It is a theory of 
phenomenal existence deduced from the observed 
facts of existence. It has pushed itself forward by 
force of its sheer reasonableness, until it now domi- 
nates every department of secular science. I do not 
think it would be possible to find a single person who 
has been educated in the physical sciences within the 
last twenty years who is not an Evolutionist. Its 
scientific opponents died a royal death in Professor 
Agassiz — but they are dead. It has in a generation 
rendered obsolete whole libraries of apologetics. 
Bishop Butler's postulates are now the subject matter 
of "The New Evidences." It has produced a new 
Psychology, a new moral Philosophy, a new Anthro- 
pology, and is now working a revolution in The- 
ology. 

It cannot be otherwise. " Science " and " Ke- 
ligion " cannot be kept apart. Human nature is not 
constructed with bulkheads. The contents of one 
compartment flow into and color the contents of 



196 EVOLUTION AND GOD 

every other one. The dreariest of all failures have 
been the attempts to "reconcile" "Religion" and 
" Science." Truth is one and needs no mediator. So 
much as I may possess of Religion and of Science are 
identical. I cannot distinguish between them even in 
thought. I think in a certain direction and for con- 
venience' sake call it a religious act ; I move in an- 
other direction and call the action moral; and in 
a third and call it scientific. In very truth the 
terms might be used interchangeably. If my religion 
be honest and spontaneous, it has, therefore, a scien- 
tific quality. That is to say, it is a procedure which 
receives the sanction of my whole being, and justifies 
itself in the same scientific way as does the truth that 
two and two make four. This identity is so complete 
that everything which changes or modifies my con- 
ception of the material universe changes also my con- 
ception of the spiritual universe, and vice versa. As 
thoughts of the two emerge, they mingle with and 
color one another at the very fountain-head before 
they flow into consciousness. I find, therefore, in my- 
self, what occidental Christendom is finding in itself, 
that the contents of my religious belief have become 
penetrated and saturated by a thought of the material 
universe which came to me later in time than did the 
contents of my faith. 

Theology and Anthropology are correlatives. One's 
thought of what God is is dependent upon what he 
thinks man and the universe to be. If either side be 



EVOLUTION AND GOD 197 

changed without a corresponding modification in the 
other, the equation is thrown out of balance, and one 
experiences a strange sense of distress. Such a 
change has occurred in our time. 

Whence and how came the things which we see ? 
The heavens and the earth and the sea ? The teem- 
ing life of plant and brute and man? Most of us 
were reared to think of them as the cunning work of 
a great Artificer, each of them fast set in that order 
or place or nature in which it was placed at that time 
a few thousand years ago when "Creation" was 
ended. We unconsciously thought of the Creator as 
independent of his creation. We thought of creation 
as complete. Things were, as to their essential na- 
tures, such as they had been at the beginning ; and 
such they would remain until the great Builder should 
reappear as the great Destroyer. We have found 
that the facts are not thus. The universe of to-day is 
not that of yesterday, the universe of to-morrow will 
not be that of to-day. All things are moving, chang- 
ing, transforming themselves. When Mr. Darwin 
showed that in the animate world species were not 
fixed and final, but fluid and plastic, he destroyed at 
a stroke the old conception of creation. If his read- 
ing of the facts be true, we are now in the midst of 
the creative process. The movement which we see, 
and of which we are a part is not different in kind 
from that " creation " which we had fancied ended 
long ago. The mechanical notion of the universe and 



198 EVOLUTION AND GOD 

of God's relation to it is rapidly disappearing. The 
terms which were in use a generation ago are no 
longer heard. Doctor Paley's " watch " has been 
laid away. People no longer speak of " mechanism " 
and "adaptation" and "design." They speak of 
" organism " and " development " and " growth " and 
evolution. The way of thinking about nature has 
changed. 

At this point I wish to say that I am intentionally 
avoiding the technical terms and phrases of philoso- 
phy and metaphysics. My purpose is to set forth the 
changes which Evolution has caused in the common 
thought about God and religion, and not the changes 
in those theories with which philosophies deal. The 
two things are not the same. There may be twenty 
theories about God, held by different philosophers in 
the same community, at the same time. But the 
community itself has a notion of its own which may 
be different from any or all of them. 

Western Christendom, since Augustine's time, has 
had its own notions about God and Nature, both of 
which notions it accepted at his hands, not because 
they were true, but because they were easily present- 
able in thought. Its theolog}^, its anthropology, and 
its science have been until lately adjusted to one an- 
other. The theory of evolution has destroyed the 
adjustment. The current notions about God and the 
new thought about nature cannot get on together. 

According to the average man, the points at which 



EVOLUTION AND GOD 199 

God and nature touch each other are Creation, Beve- 
lation, Incarnation, Miracles, and Judgment. Besides 
this there is a shadowy thought of a Divine superin- 
tendence of affairs called Providence ; but this is 
usually conceived of in such a vague and contradic- 
tory way, that the notion will not yield up its con- 
tents to analysis. ISTow, these terms do not connote 
the same things to an Evolutionist that they do to an 
immediate Creationist. I have already quoted Mr. 
John Fiske's confession of his own youthful concep- 
tion of God as a celestial timekeeper noting in a vol- 
ume all a boy's deeds. 

I am quite aware that it may be said that the 
youthful philosopher's idea of God was a better and 
safer one than the one for which he exchanged it in 
his mature years. I will not quarrel with that. It 
may be so, conceivably. But I wish to point out that 
the child of an Evolutionist, belonging to a generation, 
and reared in a community where the new thought of 
nature and man prevails, could no more present to 
himself thus his idea of God than he could present 
Him under the figure of the Buddha or Baal. That 
way of thinking which we term evolution has changed 
all this. It dominates contemporary literature. It has 
possession of the centres of thought. It is at home in 
the university. It is in the school-books which our 
children use. It colors popular speech. It has re- 
corded itself permanently in the structure of the 
human mind. The notion of the transcendental God, 



200 EVOLUTION AND GOB 

the great Artificer, the great Wonder-worker, the 
great Judge, which has obtained in Western Christen- 
dom for fourteen hundred years, can no longer hold 
its place. Science has escorted this simulacrum of a 
Deity to the frontiers of his universe, and, with many 
expressions of consideration, give him his conge. 

That what I say is a true statement of the situa- 
tion, I bring three representative witnesses to testify. 
First, the secularist and agnostic, Mr. Samuel Laing : 

" There are two theories of the universe which are 
in direct conflict : the one that it was created and is 
upheld by miracles — that is, by a succession of second- 
ary supernatural interferences by a Being who is a 
magnified man, acting from motives which, however 
transcendental, are essentially human ; the other that 
it is the result of Evolution acting by natural laws on 
a basis of the Unknowable. Both theories cannot be 
true." 

The second witness is Professor Le Conte, the de- 
vout Christian and distinguished man of science : 

" If the sustentation of the universe by the law of 
gravitation does not disturb our belief in God as the 
sustainer of the universe, there is no reason why the 
origin of the universe by the law of Evolution should 
disturb our faith in God as the Creator of the uni- 
verse. . . . But it is evident that a yielding here 
implies not a mere shifting of line, but a change of 
base ; not a readjustment of details, but a reconstruc- 
tion of Christian theology. This, I believe, is indeed 



EVOLUTION AND GOD 201 

necessary. From the point of view of Science some 
very fundamental changes in traditional views are al- 
ready plain. Of these the most fundamental are our 
ideas concerning God, Nature, and Man, and their re- 
lations to one another." 

The third witness is that group of English clergy 
who have brought their testimonies together in that 
volume called " Lux Mundi," under the editorship of 
Dr. Gore, Principal of Pusey House, Oxford : 

" God's immanence in nature, the ' higher panthe- 
ism,' whioh is a truth essential to true religion as it is 
to true philosophy, had fallen into the background. 
Slowly but surely the [opposite] theory of the world 
has been undermined. The one absolutely impossible 
conception of God in the present day is that which 
represents Him as an occasional visitor. Science has 
pushed [that] God farther and farther away, and at the 
moment when it seemed as if He would be thrust out 
altogether, Darwinism appeared, and under the dis- 
guise of a foe did the work of a friend. It has con- 
ferred upon Eeligion an inestimable benefit by show- 
ing us that we must choose between two alternatives. 
Either God is everywhere present in nature or He is 
nowhere. We must return to the Christian view of 
direct Divine agency, the immanence of Divine power 
in Nature from end to end, or Ave must banish Him 
altogether. It seems as if in the providence of God 
the mission of modern science is to bring home to us 
[this conception of God]. We are not surprised, 



202 EVOLUTION AND GOD 

therefore, that one who, like Professor Fiske, holds 
that ' the infinite and eternal Power that is manifested 
in every pulsation of the universe is none other than 
the living God ' should instinctively feel his kinship 
with Athanasius." 

How, then, will the Evolutionist conceive of God 
and His relation to Nature ? I reply that, in the first 
place, his notions will not be nearly so clearly cut, 
sharply defined, and easily presentable in thought as 
those which have been current. It will be charged 
against them that they are vague, elusive, and in 
places contradictory. And the charge will be true. 
But to it two retorts are available. First, that this is 
true also of Job and Isaiah, of St. Paul and St. John 
the Divine ; and the second is that it may be better to 
conceive faultily of a true God than to conceive accu- 
rately of a false one. 

The Evolutionist believes that he sees things in the 
very act of becoming. They are being transformed 
before his very eyes. He has discovered that the 
physical forces which he sees at work are transmut- 
able, and are, therefore, one. He expects that the 
vital and psychical forces which he sees to be also at 
work will be found ultimately to be identical with 
them. He is not able to distinguish between " nat- 
ural " and " supernatural." There is one energy and 
only one. It manifests itself in the attraction of 
gravitation ; as vital force it holds organized matter 
together in living things ; it " wells up in ourselves in 



EVOLUTION AND GOD 203 

the form of consciousness." It enfolds and interpene- 
trates them all, and in it all things live and move and 
have their coherence. It is Wisdom, for it is the sub- 
jective side of what we see objectively as design ; it is 
Righteousness, for it harmonizes with moral conscious- 
ness ; it is Goodness, for it is felt whenever the sense 
of sonship is awakened with its attendant affection. 

" But," it is asked, " is this eternal, all-embracing, 
all-penetrating Energy a Person? Can it say If " 
To this I answer, Yes and No. If men would stop 
for a moment to examine what they mean by the sort 
of "personality" which they usually predicate of 
God, they would not use the term as glibly as they 
often do. By personality they mean the power to 
distinguish in self -consciousness between the subject 
who thinks and other existences which have an in- 
dependent subsistence. That idea of " personality " 
attributed to God means Dualism. The Evolutionist 
conceives differently of God. He thinks that all 
things are one in Him. When He thinks, wills, feels, 
the whole universe is involved in the act both as sub- 
ject and object. 

The human brain is a highly organized mass of 
matter in a certain condition called living. As- 
sociated with it is thought, will, emotion. The two 
things manifest themselves concomitantly. As 
thought is to the human brain, so is God to the uni- 
verse. Symmetrical and orderly movement in the 
molecules of the brain is at once the sign and the con- 



204: EVOLUTION AND GOD 

sequence of thought. The devout evolutionist sees in 
the infinitely complex but harmonious movement of 
the universe the sign of the indwelling God. He can- 
not think of God coming into the universe from with- 
out to create, to regulate, to deliver. He does not 
ask, Who shall ascend into heaven to bring Him 
down? for he knows that He is always here. He 
reverently waits and watches to see the Divine ideas 
express themselves in terms of life and matter. He 
believes that the sum total of things as it exists at 
any one moment is the best expression of God's 
thought at that moment possible; but that it must 
give place to the next one which speaks still more 
perfectly. He does not sharply distinguish be- 
tween the Kevelation which is accomplished by one 
means and that accomplished by another, calling the 
one Divine and the other Natural. He sees develop- 
ment both in the book of grace and the book of na- 
ture. Both of them uncover God " multifariously and 
fragmentarily " as men become able to see. He waits 
with confident expectation the " fullness of time " for 
the Perfect Man, and is not surprised to find that He 
and God are one. He sees a Divine quality not only 
in all perfect things completed, but in the slow proc- 
esses by which they reach completeness. He is not 
surprised at the crude religion and faulty morals of 
Patriarchs, and is not perplexed in the presence of 
goodness in the pagan world. He agrees with Justin 
Martyr, as quoted approvingly by those devout 



EVOLUTION AND GOD 205 

Evolutionists, the authors of "Lux Mundi," that 
"those who lived under the guidance of Eternal 
Keason, as Socrates, Heracleitus, and such like, are 
Christians, even though they were reckoned to be 
atheists in their day." He does not believe that the 
"Kingdom of Heaven cometh with observation." He 
does not think it true to say, " Lo, here is Christ, or 
lo, there ! " He believes that God manifest in the 
flesh has taken up into Himself all things ; that the 
whole phenomenal universe together and in its myriad 
parts is moving, changing, transforming itself, and 
recombining, not blindly and without a goal, but by 
orderly methods, which it is the function of science to 
discover and formulate, toward that harmonious 
equilibrium of spiritual and natural harmony for 
which no phrase stands so fittingly as that of the 
Master, " The Kingdom of God." 

Now, I am painfully alive to the fact that this 
whole way of thinking and speaking seems to many 
to be vague, elusive, and unsafe. It is beyond all 
comparison easier to think of the world as created at 
a definite moment of time so many centuries ago, by 
the hand of a God who appeared out of the immensity 
to do that task ; that He then fashioned cunningly all 
living things in genus and species as they are now ; 
that man rebelled against Him at once, and were all 
abandoned by Him to their fate, except a certain few 
whom He looked down upon from above and gathered 
out from their fellows into a commonwealth with 



206 EVOLUTION AND GOD 

which alone He held relations; that, at a definite 
point centuries thereafter, arbitrarily chosen, He re- 
appeared to select other some, absolutely a great mul- 
titude, whom no man can number, but relatively an in- 
significant number from the teeming myriads of men ; 
that, with these exceptions, a rebellious and blighted 
world is abandoned by its Maker to its own purpose- 
less confusion, waiting for its end to be accomplished 
in one dread catastrophe. 

This conception of God and the world is simple, 
portable, always available for the practical needs of a 
teacher or exhorter, easy to state and easy to receive. 
It is the theology of the Salvation Army. It obtains 
commonly among Koman Catholics and Methodists. 
It is what newspaper writers have vaguely in mind 
when they are moved to deliver themselves on ques- 
tions of theology. It was the theology held in com- 
mon by Jonathan Edwards, and Luther, and the 
doctors of Trent, and Calvin, and Thomas Aquinas, 
and Augustine. It may be the true one ; but I do not 
think so. It was not the theology of that sweet 
soul, Pelagius, or Origen, or Justin Martyr, or 
Clement, or Paul, or John; nor, have I so learned 
Christ. 

Says the Popular Science Monthly : " Two things 
are evident, first, that the traditional religion has lost 
its hold on most scientifically educated men ; and, 
second, that such minds will not be content without 
some religion." Such are the great mass of the minds 



EVOLUTION AND GOD 207 

with which we have to do. What shall we say to 
them of God ? 

Eishop Huntington thus quaintly says, or sings : 

" The Parish Priest 

Of austerity 
Climbed up a high church steeple, 

To be nearer God, 

So that he might hand 
His word down to His people. 

" And in sermon script 

He daily wrote 
What he thought was sent from heaven, 

And he dropped this down 

On the people's heads 
Two times one day in seven. 

" In his age God said: 

'Come down and die; ' 
And he cried out from the steeple, 

1 Where art thou, Lord ? ' 

And the Lord replied, 
'Down here among my people.' " 



GOD MAKTFES1 



XIII 

GOD MANIFEST 

I suppose that all intelligent men do, in a way, be- 
lieve in God. It is difficult to see how phenomena 
can be thought of at all without having at least in the 
background of one's mind the consciousness of some 
sort of existence which is not phenomenal. Avoiding 
the language of metaphysics, I do not see how one can 
observe reasonableness in the sequence of things with- 
out tacitly assuming a Reason which lies behind 
things, and who is in some way the cause of things. 
In a word, and speaking for myself alone, I find it im- 
possible to believe in a heaven and an earth without 
believing in a Creator of the heavens and the earth. 
I know that some men are capable of doing so, but I 
am not. Of course I do not conceive of Him as hav- 
ing completed His creation at some time in the past 
and from the outside. Creation and Providence seem 
to me to be the same thing. Or, to speak more 
accurately, Creation, so far as one can see has been in 
progress, and is in progress, and will be eternally. 
Chance and progress, integration and disintegration 
and reintegration, even in the natural universe is 
" eternal." At least it is so to all practical purposes. 

For the phrase " eternal " is but a symbol, like the 

211 



212 GOD MANIFEST 

Algebraic. One thinks the series of changes back- 
ward or forward to the point where his mind falters 
and stops. What lies beyond he labels with the 
symbol of an unknown quantity and calls it " eternal." 
No two men mean the same thing by the word. 
Much vain disputation would have been saved both in 
Philosophy and Theology if men had always borne 
this simple fact in mind. They have wrangled over 
the questions as to whether matter is eternal, or 
whether future reward or penalty shall be eternal, 
forgetting that ex vi termini they have not been able 
to define eternal. 

It is not until we reach this point that my dis- 
tinctively Christian belief begins. So far I only be- 
lieve in God because I find my mind so constituted 
that it refuses to rest upon the universe as a finality. 

But thus far, and by these methods we have not 
reached the Christian God. That there is something 
behind the phenomena which we see, seems to be an al- 
most unanimous conviction. The mind refuses to rest 
upon the universe as a finality. I cannot think of 
phenomena without passing on to think of a sub- 
stance, a suh-stans as a background for the things 
which are seen. I think it must be intelligent because 
I shrink from the thought of intellectual confusion at 
the inmost heart of things. I think it is good, partly- 
because I see that evil seems to have within it a 
quality which tends to destroy itself, but chiefly be- 
cause the most imperative and categorical of all my 



GOB MANIFEST 213 

faculties seem to declare it. I " ought " is what I owe. 
But owe to what? to whom? The moral sense is 
the rift in the encircling wall of Nature through 
which noble souls have always gone out in confidence 
to seek God. From Isaiah and Epictetus to Carlyle 
and Amiel the burden of the prophet and the faith of 
the righteous man has always been that there is " a 
power, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness." 
But is this the last word ? 

11 1 falter where I firmly trod, 

And falling with my weight of cares 
Upon the great world's altar-stairs 
That slope through darkness up to God, 

" I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope, 
And gather dust and chaff, and call 
To what I blindly feel is Lord of All, 
And faintly trust the larger hope." 

Is this all ? Natural science and secular philosophy 
sadly answer, yes. Thirty-six years ago in the first 
volume of his magnum opus their fittest spokesman 
declared, " The Power which the Universe manifests 
to us is utterly inscrutable." 1 The same depressing 
conclusion is reaffirmed in the final volume issued yes- 
terday. 2 

At this point we are arrested by the voice of Jesus 
Christ offering to uncover the eternal secret of God. 
Why should we heed Him rather than another ? 

1 Herbert Spencer : Forst Principles. 
* Synthetic Philosophy, Vol. iii. 



214 GOB MANIFEST 

This is the parting of the ways. Multitudes of 
intelligent men, not ignorant of the course of human 
thought, have parted company with their scientific 
friends, and hearken unto Christ. Two men are in 
the same laboratory, the same school, the same business, 
equally familiar with the world's knowledge. The 
one sees in Christ the fullness of the Godhead bodily. 
The other sees in Him but the noblest of the world's 
dreamers. 

But why should I heed Jesus Christ rather than an- 
other man upon such a matter ? And the answer I 
give myself is something like this : 

I believe in Jesus Christ to begin with, because He 
has been able to get Himself so widely believed in. I 
find Him to be at this moment the most striking per- 
sonality in the world. More men do actually listen to 
Him when He speaks about God than to any other. 
He has held ground and steadily gained ground 
through so many centuries ; His teaching has evidently 
given satisfaction and rest to so many ; and among 
these have been included such numbers of those who 
bear every mark of seekers after the truth, that I must 
needs join myself to them, at least to listen. I lay 
emphasis here upon the distinctness of His present 
personality. I am not concerned yet with the agencies 
by which I am introduced to Him. , The record of His 
life in the gospels may be ever so inaccurate. His 
early disciples may have misapprehended Him greatly. 
The Church may be built around a caricature of His 



GOD MANIFEST 215 

teachings. All this does not yet affect the case. "We 
may think lightly of all such discrepancies if all we wish 
for is an open path to the mind of Christ. Only the 
craving for an explicit and final " authority " makes 
them serious. The path is open enough. There is a 
lifelikeness about His figure as it is now conceived by 
the world which seems to me to be unmistakable. 
There is a verisimilitude and coherence in His teach- 
ing which is sufficient to vindicate its historical ac- 
curacy. When I listen I am convinced that " never 
man spake like this man " upon those subjects with 
which He concerns Himself. I am arrested first by 
what He says ; and then by the effect of His teaching 
upon His own life and destiny. 

He begins by saying, " I am the Son of Man " — an 
oriental form of speech intimating his preeminent pos- 
session of those qualities which belong to humanity. 
As one of his contemporaries would have said when 
wishing to assert his love of peace, " I am the Son of 
peace ; " or another vaunting his valor would say, " I 
am the son of war," so he at the very beginning chal- 
lenges attention to the essential nature of Man. He 
declares that when the consciousness of humanity is 
carried to the ultimate power it becomes conscious of 
Divinity. He applies to himself the two phrases Son 
of Man and Son of God as interchangeable. He ap- 
peals directly to human consciousness as the witness 
of God's essential fatherhood. He was the first to 
take his stand upon this fundamental rock. He stood 



216 GOB MANIFEST 

upon it, and allowed all contradictory forces to break 
themselves against him. He said in effect : 

" One is your father, even God. It is not His will 
that a hair of your head should be lost. You may 
trust Him absolutely, not only to do wisely by you, 
but to do lovingly by you. The forces of the universe 
are dominated by good will. The essential nature of 
God is not might, nor wisdom, but love. God is love. 
This is the fundamental fact of existence and always 
has been. Even in eternity God was moved by that 
imperious instinct of propagation whereby love ex- 
presses itself among all living things. God is from 
eternity, father and son. Ye are His offspring. The 
universe is the Father's child. Wherever any atom of 
it rises into self-consciousness it becomes aware of its 
kinship with God. This is its most primal instinct. 
Whenever it comes to itself it says, ' I will arise and 
go to my Father.' " 

Jesus claims a unique and exceptional clearness of 
vision for Himself here. He asserts that men are not 
alive to what is the fundamental fact concerning them- 
selves, their descent from God. He does see it dis- 
tinctly, it is the fact which governs His conduct. He 
asserts that He discerns it because He is the " man most 
man." At this point arises the inquiry, how did He 
come to see that which other men do not see, or see so 
dimly ? Was it in virtue of any peculiar quality or gift 
belonging to Him which is wanting in other men ? I de- 
fer for the present the attempt to answer this question 



GOD MANIFEST 217 

farther than to call attention to the uncompromising 
way in which He called upon all to see and act upon 
the fact exactly as He saw and acted upon it. 

He roundly asserted to men and women at all stages 
of moral and intellectual acuteness or obtuseness, — 
" Ye are the children of your Father who is in heaven ; 
His dominant quality is paternal affection ; this affec- 
tion wraps you round about and can no more be de- 
tached from you than can a mother's love from a suck- 
ing child ; if you will only open your eyes you will see 
that this is true ; if you will act upon it practically you 
will discover that even those forces which bring you 
into distress bend to it and are to be interpreted by it. 
I do so." 

From this ground of truth He goes on to announce a 
practical corollary, — "If ye are all children of one 
father ye are therefore brethren of one another. Then 
you must act accordingly." 

Men have been accustomed to act upon the theory 
that beyond certain very narrow limits, they cannot 
trust their fortunes to the operation of the sense of 
humaneness, that is of mutual kinship, with its corre- 
sponding affection. They have looked upon the mass 
of men as strangers from whom little or nothing of 
good was to be expected. Each has been habitually 
on the alert to guard himself and his own interests, to 
protect those by resenting all attack, and if need be by 
destroying the aggressor. He says, " In My kingdom 
which is the regime of God men will not act so. If 



218 GOD MANIFEST 

any man love father or mother or sister or brother 
more than Me he is not worthy of Me. If any man 
take up a sword, he shall perish by the sword." 

Now, it is abundantly evident to thoughtful men 
that this is true. Even wise men do not fight. Any 
scheme of life which revolves about the principle of 
selfishness is self-destructive. It moves in a vicious 
circle from which it never can escape. Nature red in 
tooth and claw with ravin is the standing parable of 
its truth. If a strong man armed keep his house, the 
strength of his fortification challenges the strength 
and resources of the robber. If a nation build up an 
armament against another nation, it is answered by a 
corresponding armament. Each one must of necessity 
add force to force in the titanic rivalry until the burden 
of the armor become crushing. Then it must fight for 
the opportunity to disarm. When, finally, one stands su- 
preme, overlooking its shattered rivals, its very atti- 
tude evokes enemies, and again begins the horrible 
cycle. But men while seeing this have thought that 
it was just one of the world's conditions which must 
be accepted and within whose bloody frontier they 
must pass their existence either in actual or possible 
violence. Jesus says, — "You must disarm without 
waiting for your neighbor to lay down his weapons. 
Take the attitude of a little child who ventures into 
the arena with a smile. At first you may be trampled 
upon or hurled violently out of the way with damage 
to yourself, for the lust of blood is strong upon the 



GOD MANIFEST 219 

gladiators and they are urged upon one another by the 
world's clamor. But do not fear. Not a hair of your 
head shall be wasted. If you are smitten on the one 
cheek turn the other ; if your brother curse you bless 
him ; if he take your coat offer him your cloak ; only 
by acting so can you uncover and set in play that 
force which in the long run is the only potent one to 
which your fortunes may be safely tied, the power of 
love." 

Now, it is obvious that all this is true, and also that 
the world is slowly coming to see that it is true and 
to act upon it. The slow but steady gentling of man- 
ners is but the slow conquest of Jesus' theory of life 
over its rival theory. 

But He does not shut His eyes to the immediate con- 
sequence of this mode of life to those who adopt it. It 
will bring a cross. Indeed, He calls His theory the 
way of the cross. This, in His mind, is that " doctrine 
of the cross " which His followers, having their minds 
filled with the Hebrew and Pagan ideas upon which 
they had been reared, quickly transformed into the 
theory of " Expiation." He proposed not to bear the 
cross for the people, but that they should each take up 
his own cross and follow in His steps. But He always 
declares that that way life lies, and death the other 
way. 

I have stated in the last paragraph what seems to 
me to be the points which give the elements of the 
orbit of Jesus' teaching in that portion which touches 



220 GOD MANIFEST 

upon human living. These are, the paternal love of 
God ; the kinship of men ; and the Doctrine of the 
Cross. Are they the dicta of a man ? or of a God ? or 
of a God-man ? This last alternative has long been a 
phrase to conjure by. Blind orthodoxy has mumbled 
it as the pagan, suckled in a creed outgrown, mutters 
his Earn ! Ram ! Ram ! But on the other hand it has 
served wise and holy men as the fittest short term 
they could apply to Jesus Christ. It is a condensation 
of the phrases by which He habitually describes Him- 
self, Son of God and Son of Man. These terms upon 
His lips seem to be the expression of a complex ex- 
perience in His own consciousness. 1 

"When His sense of being as a man is most intense 
He speaks with the most profound sense of Divinity. 
Yet there is clearly no trace or suggestion of mental 
disturbance. One has only to listen to His serene self- 
contained lucid speech to feel that "this madness 
would gambol from." "What will account for this 
strange sense of oneness with God ? There is nothing 
in it which resembles the " God-intoxication " of the 
oriental enthusiast. Nor is there anything which calls 
to mind Socrates' familiar daemon. While His con- 
sciousness was complex it was clearly single. What- 

1 But little study seems to have been given to the psychology of 
Jesus. So far as I am aware but one extant book deals with the pe- 
culiar psychological processes in Him which are indicated by His dis- 
courses, replies and actions, and this book not successfully. 

See Bernard; Mental Characteristics of Jesus. Also Canon Gore ; 
Dissertations. 



GOD MANIFEST 221 

ever its component elements may have been they were 
perfectly fused in a single personality. 1 "Whenever He 
thought, moved or acted, one feels that it was the ac- 
tion of the whole being. But it is equally clear that 
He claimed an essential Divine quality for His words 
and person which has no parallel among men. The 
consensus of human judgment has dismissed as a mad- 
man or as a blasphemer every other man who has so 
much as intimated a similar claim. It is very note- 
worthy that both these explanations of His character 
were given during His life ; and that they were both 
rejected by a community which knew Him well and 
was hostile to Him. His own explanation of His God- 
consciousness would seem to be plain enough, whether 
or not it be accepted as true to the facts of the case. 
He asserts with much iteration that it was due to His 
mode of living ; and that it was open to any other who 
chose to follow Him. He first uncovered and then 
resolutely followed that moral energy in Himself which 
He asserted to be pre-potent, that motive which ex- 
presses itself in thought as an absolute confidence 
in God's fatherliness, and in action by living in love 
with one's fellows. His outward life would seem to 
be but the exemplification of the fortunes of one who 
has achieved such an inward triumph. The force of 
things as they are lays upon such a one a cross ; it 

'I need hardly point ont that the term "personal" as nsed in 
speaking of the Trinity, for example, has little in common with the 
term " personal " as nsed in common speech. 



222 GOD MANIFEST 

leads him to death ; but cannot break the continuity 
of his existence through and after death, for the rea- 
son that the force to which he has adjusted himself is 
more persistent and more potent than the environment 
which contains him. 

Here many notions very common among Christian 
folk must be definitely abandoned. To think of Him 
as a self-conscious personality " coming " to this out- 
lying world from the seat of God's eternal power re- 
mote in space, and incarnating Himself in the form of 
man with an independent self-conscious human soul, is 
in fact not to think at all. To accept such a piece of 
mental imagery and call it a " mystery " is unworthy. 
Men are prone to sit down at the border of what they 
choose to call holy ground under the pretense of tak- 
ing off their shoes when their real motive is intellectual 
indolence. There is a candor and forthrightness about 
the New Testament Scriptures which invites to an 
examination not only of what Jesus is, but of how He 
came to be what He is. 

Let one in this reverent and fearless mood open the 
gospels and he will find himself at home. He will be 
met at the threshold with the challenge Behold the 
Man ! If he look upon Him long enough, steadfastly 
enough, and with sufficiently clear sight he will be 
likely to cry, " My Lord, and my God ! " 

He was a man, a Hebrew, a Nazarene, born A. U. 
C. about 746. His roots were in the crumbling gen- 
erations. He was a rod of the stem of Jesse. Hereditv 



GOD MANIFEST 223 

and environment wrought in and upon Him as well as 
another. Of His early life absolutely nothing is 
known. Of His youth a single incident is told which 
may very well have happened, or may equally well 
have been a pious imagining thrown backward upon 
His early life from later years by those who loved His 
memory. He comes upon the stage as a man in ma- 
ture life, in response to the summons of a prophet who 
sternly preached the gospel of Kepentance. To this 
preaching He at first responds, but after a little pro- 
nounces it to be inadequate. He lays His axe to the 
root of the tree. He substitutes for John's gospel the 
gospel of the New Life. Kepentance may indeed rid 
the soul of parlous stuff, but it will give no guarantee 
of future purity. It opens no spring of spiritual life. 
It is a mechanical process of cleansing. What is 
needed is a vital process of growth. The prophet who 
had made experiment of his own medicament was the 
first to acknowledge this. He foretells the decadence 
of his own gospel and the increase of the new one. 
And Jesus declares that great as is the Prophet of Ke- 
pentance the least in the kingdom of life is greater 
than he. 

That Jesus had slowly and painfully wrought out 
His spiritual discovery is plain. He had in the new 
life achieved consciousness of His divinity and rec- 
ognized the secret voice of God saying, " Thou art My 
well-beloved Son; this day have I begotten Thee." 
But He held it yet unstably and in spiritual tumult. 



224 GOD MANIFEST 

It must be tested before He could definitely entrust 
His fortunes to it. Nothing could be more psycho- 
logically accurate than the story of the Temptation in 
the desert. The firstborn as well as all his brethren 
must face temptation solitary. In the secret place of 
his innermost life he must make trial of his new felt 
divinity. Will he satisfy his hunger for bread or his 
hunger for righteousness ? Will he commit his destiny 
to those forces which build up the kingdom of the 
world and the glory of them ? Or will he serve the 
eternal force which stirs within him ? Will he cast 
himself down from the spiritual elevation where he is, 
trusting that somehow God will bring his life to a 
right issue ? The threefold aspect of His Temptation 
is not exhaustive but it is typical. It attacked His 
slowly achieved but distinct consciousness of His divine 
nature. From that time on His life was a constant 
temptation. His theory of living was tested by the 
reactions upon it of social life, of religious institutions, 
of political arrangements. John, preaching the gospel 
of Kepentance, could withdraw from all these and fight 
his barren battle as well in the wilderness as else- 
where. Jesus' Way could only be tested by living, 
and is possible only in the midst of life. After His 
final storm of doubtfulness and hesitation had subsided 
He walked serenely into the market-place, the syna- 
gogue, the home, the firstborn of a new race, and, in 
consequence, the firstborn of the sons of God. Trust- 
ing Himself to the heavenly arms which He believed 



GOD MANIFEST 225 

to be about 'Elm, He appealed unhesitatingly to the 
good will of men. The result of His experiment is re- 
corded in the gospels. At once He called for followers. 
The condition which He exacted was that each of 
them should discover within himself the same confi- 
dence in God's essential fatherliness, and the same in- 
expugnable good will to men which was in Himself. 
The Sermon on the Mount was His address to the lit- 
tle forlorn hope. Some of them it frightened. They 
went backward and walked no more with Him. The 
author of Ecce Homo has pointed out with transcend- 
ent subtilty and truth the way in which His " Call " 
acted as a winnowing fan in His hand. It winnowed 
ruthlessly. He was seeking for seed from which 
should spring a new race of men, and would have none 
except such as possessed the principle of life in it. 
That He selected wisely, the issue has show r n, for each 
little one has become a thousand. But it was clear to 
Him from the first that the conditions of life were such 
that, until they should be changed, it would be impossi- 
ble for any one acting as He proposed to retain his life. 
He called his working theory of life by the short 
word " Faith." Hardly any word in human speech has 
since been so misused. "What He meant by it is clear. 
He meant that act of the will by which one determines 
to live by the rule of love and trust. Whoever wills so 
possesses Faith in proportion to the strenuousness of 
his determination. " Believing in Him" meant the 
moral conviction that His " Way " was a right and prac- 



226 GOD MANIFEST 

ticable way. The word in religious speech has almost 
entirely lost its original connotation. It has come to 
be practically synonymous with credulity in one con- 
nection, and with religious emotion in another. One 
can see even in the later Epistles, especially those of 
St. Paul, the beginning of this change of use. With 
Jesus, " believing " simply meant the willingness to ad- 
venture in this world upon a mode of life under the 
domination of divine and human love. The difficulty 
and painf ulness of such a life are so great that one will 
only adopt it under the light of a moral illumination 
equivalent to being born again. He who has achieved 
it has, in Jesus' phrase, " come to himself." That is, 
he has discovered what is the essential and constant 
quality in his own nature. 

The outcome of this life of faith in the case of 
Jesus is well known. His way was in the face of all ac- 
cepted manners. He exasperated alike the moralist, 
the ecclesiastic, and the conventionally religious man, 
the sociologist and the magistrate. If He was right 
they were wrong. If His kingdom were to prevail 
theirs must needs perish. The world was not without 
a morality. It had a method of conduct evolved from 
the experience of the race, stated in terms of juris- 
prudence, sustained by immemorial custom, fortified 
by religious observance and ecclesiastical ritual. The 
representatives of every one of these turned upon 
Him. He did not attack them or propose any reform 
for them. He bore Himself toward them all much as 



GOD MANIFEST 22 T 

a man would bear himself toward the fantastic ar. 
rangements of a village of lunatics in which he found 
himself living. Actions which seemed to them 
natural and therefore bounden, He declined altogether 
to perform. His notion of nature was not theirs. 
Conduct which seemed to them unnatural and impracti- 
cable He demanded and showed. "With an amazing 
appearance of simplicity He assured them that their 
laws were unrighteous, their ritual irreligious, their 
ethics immoral, their church a synagogue of satan. He 
tested all men and all institutions by their actual effect 
upon the lives of men. He pronounced them and theirs 
ungodly because He found them to be inhuman. The 
Church existed for its own aggrandizement. The State 
had no ruth. The rich had no bowels of compassion. 
He turned away from them all in a sort of divine 
rage, after heaping maledictions upon them which they 
never forgave. He discovered that they were all so 
committed to their mode of living that there was 
no hope of their accepting His mode. Then He 
turned to the people, the common people, the average 
man, who then as always simply accepts existing con- 
ditions of life without deliberately giving bonds to 
them. These were sufficiently free to adopt His life 
of Faith if they chose. At first the}^ heard Him 
gladly. His display of the beatitudes which lay far 
along in the path to which He invited them was allur- 
ing. But when they confronted the Cross which 
those must needs carry who trod that path, they fell 



228 GOD MANIFEST 

away. Only a few, whose natures were remotely 
akin to His own walked with Him. Evil and selfish 
men shrank from Him as driven by a magnetic repul- 
sion. Among all His followers was not one who 
would not antecedently have been pronounced good. 
Even the Magdalene was already sick of her sin into 
which she had been drawn by the excess of her love. 
It could not be said of her, — "Thy sin's not acci- 
dental ; 'tis a trade." The malefactor who hung upon 
the neighboring cross was a misguided patriot, brave 
and devoted enough to have struck a blow in insurrec- 
tion against that tyranny which his countrymen con- 
tented themselves with safely cursing. He drew to 
Him the pure, the tender, the generous, the brave, the 
spiritually minded. They who had ears to hear heard. 
For the rest, having ears they heard not, and seeing 
they did not understand. 

He bade those who chose to share His life of Faith 
become in every particular like Himself. When 
they were struck with the sight of His moral exalta- 
tion, He bade them surpass the moral point at which 
He was, and to be perfect even as their Father in 
heaven is perfect. When they marvelled at some of 
His mighty works he assured them that it was possi- 
ble for them to do even greater works than these. At 
every point of His own development He paused to as- 
sure His hesitating disciples that the way was as open 
for them as for Him, and to bid them " follow Me." 
He declares Himself to be the manifestation of God in 



GOD MANIFEST 229 

man. The burden of His work and life is that if a 
man will unhesitatingly follow the divine nature which 
is in him he will come into his own natural inheritance 
of powers undreamed of and amazing. 

That He found Himself able to perform "many 
mighty works " seems unquestionable. It is possible, 
to be sure, to disentangle the person of Jesus from the 
whole " miraculous " setting in which the gospels 
frame Him. Unitarianism and soi disant "Liberal 
Christianity " has essayed the task to do so. They 
pique themselves somewhat upon their success. But 
the figure thus separated out, and to which they point 
saying Ecce Homo, is so wan, pallid, vague and unsub- 
stantial that it arouses in the passer-by but a languid 
interest. It is easier, upon the whole, to admit the 
fact of His strange works than it is to account for the 
historical Christ without them. It may well be that 
some " signs " are attributed to Him in the gospel 
record which He did not do ; and that some marvellous 
things which He did do have perished from memory. 
Indeed, this would seem to be the testimony of the 
gospels themselves. But that He possessed and exer- 
cised occult powers appears true. And it seems 
equally true that in varying degree, His disciples did 
the like. It is interesting, but not obligatory, to ex- 
amine and come to a definite belief concerning this 
one or that among His miracles. The essential thing 
is to find some intelligible rationale of His seemingly 
unique powers. 



230 GOD MANIFEST 

Unthinking traditionalism here looks upon Jesus as 
God masquerading in human guise. God is for it the 
antithesis of " Nature." Wherever He appears in na- 
ture a circumference of disturbance surrounds him. 
Natural processes are interrupted, set aside, or turned 
backward at will. If He appear in the " person " * of a 
man, it is still not a man but God who acts. But this 
conception empties Jesus' nature of all significance 
and meaning. It was not His explanation of His 
power, nor does the record of His mighty deeds fit this 
conception. He speaks and acts constantly as though 
He conceived what we call " supernatural " powers to 
be intrinsically natural to any man who would live as 
He lived. When He walks upon the water He chides 
His friend Peter for sinking. When the disciples con- 
fessed their inability to heal a lunatic, He upbraided 
them as a faithless and perverse lot. He asserts in 
general that " all things are possible to them that be- 
lieve." If in any instance a disciple makes assay of 
his " supernatural " power and fails, Jesus ascribes the 
failure to lack of " Faith." Let us now recur to His 
definition of Faith. We will see that it has nothing in 
common with that credulity which is content to 
stupidly walk blindfold ; nor with that imaginary act 
of the will by which it offers to coerce the understand- 
ing into accepting as true that at which the under- 
standing rebels. It denotes a working theory of life. 
It is the fact of submitting one's self unreservedly to 

1 Latin persona, i. e. 7 a mask. 



GOD MANIFEST 231 

the goodness of God, and living in inexpugnable love 
for one's fellows. Such a manner of life, He teaches, 
will, if persevered in, uncover in the individual adopt- 
ing it potentialities which are intrinsically " natural " 
to men, but which seem " supernatural " to the majority 
because their mode of life has no place in it for their 
exercise. It is a peculiarly Christian faculty only, as 
He asserts in varied phrase, because Christians alone 
are really humane ; and belongs to Him in complete- 
ness because He is preeminently the Son of Man. It 
is an appanage of the Christian mode of living. Even 
John the Baptist "did no signs." John was not a 
Christian. He was the consummate fruit of the world's 
mode of living. His Baptism of Kepentance did, and 
can, wash the soul of many foul spots. But the 
Christian life is the reopening of clogged fountains in 
the essential nature of man. 

Were the miracles of Jesus the works of God ? or of 
a man ? I reply, his assumption is that they were of 
God because they were the natural expression of what 
He asserts to be the divine quality inherent in man. 
In Him, this divine faculty had become self-conscious, 
and by so doing had come to recognize its oneness with 
the God-father. For this reason He found it natural 
for Him to think and act in such ways as we are ac- 
customed to think natural only to God. 

His powers were not absolute or without limit. 
They found the frontier of their exercise at the limit 
of human capacity. There were places and occasions 



232 GOD MANIFEST 

where " He could not do many mighty works." The 
limits which concluded His knowledge concluded His 
power. Of a certain thing He said that "no man 
knoweth it, not even the Son, but the Father." In a 
word, from a human child He increased in wisdom 
and stature and in favor with man and God until He 
touched the circumference of human capacity, and 
" manifested " all of God which Humanity is capable 
of expressing. "What more could He? He is, for 
men, the perfect expression of God. He manifests 
all of God that man can contain, or can see. His 
contention is that He reaches that divine fullness of 
life by carrying to its ultimate the essential nature 
and faculty of man. He bids men follow Him. St. 
Paul sees " the measure and stature of a perfect man 
in Christ." He is the "firstborn among many 
brethren." By the will of a man He overcame the 
obstacles to the development of a man, and having 
done so discovered that He was the Son of God. 
Then He turns to His brethren and bids them come 
to themselves, and by so doing discover their common 
kinship with God. 

Thus He becomes to us Jesus, the Christ, the an- 
nointed one, His only Son, our Lord. 



THE DOCTKINE OF THE CKOSS 



XIV 

THE DOCTRINE OF THE CROSS 

It is because it is of the essential nature of God to 
bear the Cross that men assume it whenever they 
awake to their own divineness. It is not easy to ac- 
count for the strange reluctance to associate the idea 
of suffering with God. More sober thought would 
show that it must perforce be the constant fact and 
habit of his existence. His life must be an eternal 
pang as well as an eternal ecstasy. Suffering is the 
correlative and background of love for any inferior by 
any superior personality. If the lover love more than 
the loved he must suffer in the loving. If the lover 
be wiser than the loved he must bear solicitude and 
pain for the ignorance of the loved. If he be better 
than the object of his affection he must carry the heavy 
load of sorrow for the frailties of the loved. Pain is 
the sad necessity of parentage. At such time as the sons 
of God shouted together for joy their Father's burden 
began. Creation involves suffering for God. The 
father sitting in his house and aware moment by mo- 
ment of the doing of his prodigal child must bear in 
his heart the aching agony of a yearning love which 
is compelled to bide the time of its fruition. The 
whole creation groaning and travailing in pain to- 

235 



236 THE DOCTRINE OF THE CROSS 

gether must fling the shadow of its agony across the 
face of the All-Father. " Crucified from the founda- 
tion of the world " is not a phrase coined in the busy 
idleness of philosophy, but the scientific statement of 
an eternal fact. It is the concomitant of Creation in 
the experience of God. Now it has been said above, 
creation is to all practical purposes eternal. That is 
to say, for all human uses thought itself is conditioned 
upon phenomena. Metaphysics may fancy that it 
can conceive of God existing in serene absoluteness 
before the universe was, or as independent upon all 
phenomena. But if the content of such fancy be 
carefully examined it will be found to be empty. It 
will be found to contain symbols and not realities. 
God, for us, is expressed in terms of Creation. There 
are no other terms, or, to speak more accurately, we 
cannot affirm or deny that there are any other terms. 
Jesus' assertion is that Creation and the Cross flow 
simultaneously out of the essential quality of God 
which is Love. St. Paul intimates that they will 
ultimately be absorbed together " when the Son also 
Himself shall be subject to the Father, that God may 
be all in all." Between these two termini the 
whole drama of existence is concluded. Within this 
span is to be sought, if anywhere, the nature of God 
and the destiny of man. Jesus' doctrine of the Cross 
is therefore identical with His doctrine of God. He 
bears His cross, and bids men observe Him the 
while, declaring that he that hath seen Him hath 



THE DOCTRINE OE THE CROSS 237 

seen the Father. For fatherhood and pain, love and 
cross-bearing are bound up together. The crowning 
fact of His life stands as the convenient expression 
for the whole of it. His nativity, baptism, fasting 
and temptation, His agony and bloody sweat, His 
cross and passion are all suffrages in the litany of His 
life. " The Cross " is the portable formula for their 
totality. In this supreme fact He claims to be the 
manifestation of the Father. He declares, in effect, 
that suffering is the penalty of loving; that it is 
the expression of loving ; that it is the weapon 
of love ; that by it love conquers ; that this is 
true for men because it is true of God, and be- 
cause men share the nature of God being His 
offspring. While He lived, a few who were near 
to Him believed Him. But even their belief seems to 
have been produced more by the contagiousness of 
His personality than by a clear apprehension of His 
Truth. Those in the wider circle who gathered about 
Him soon deserted Him. Even the most intimate 
group were in the end staggered at the actual cruci- 
fixion, though they had in their theory accepted it as 
the legitimate outcome of His Way. His reappear- 
ance brought them together again, but in a perplexed 
and bewildered mood. He had given them a truth 
concerning the fundamental fact of existence ; a way 
of procedure which He Himself walked in, and which 
He declared to be intrinsically Life ; but they were 
slow of heart to believe that the obligation of all 



238 THE DOCTRINE OF THE CROSS 

these was in the nature of things. It has often been 
asserted that His disciples received from Him His 
Truth in formal propositions, apprehended it clearly, 
and passed it on unimpaired to their successors. The 
record itself shows that this was not true. They 
comprehended Him but partially. In great part they 
misconceived Him altogether. They were far more 
clear as to His Way than they were concerning His 
truth. They could and did adopt that mode of living 
which was His, and which led them as it had Him to 
the cross or to the lions. But of the Truth upon 
which His Way was based they had but partial un- 
derstanding. Indeed, He Himself affirms that they 
were not equal to it, and that it could only be made 
known slowly by the operation of the spirit which He 
would leave behind Him. The facts of Christianity 
came first ; the theory followed haltingly. He had 
previously announced as the law of the case that " he 
that doeth My will shall learn of My Doctrine 
whether it be of God." 

But the life of Jesus Christ is an event in time. Of 
necessity it had relations to the time when, the place 
where, and people in whose presence it was lived. 
All these helped in some ways and in others hindered 
the clear shining of His light. How they helped has 
often been remarked upon, how they hindered has 
been but little noticed. The movements of human 
history prepared a way before Him, but they also 
placed obstacles in the path which were as real as 



THE DOCTRINE OF THE CROSS 239 

those which had previously barred His coming. His 
Truth was conditioned by the capacities of those to 
whom it was spoken. The hearts of many were 
turned to Him, but the minds even of these were 
largely preoccupied with ways of thinking foreign to 
His way. After He had gone His followers essayed 
to formulate and champion His Truth. To do so they 
expressed it in the terms with which they were fa- 
miliar. In some ways these terms were inadequate, 
in some ways they were faulty. Human speech had 
to be dealt with as the missionary in our day is com- 
pelled to deal with the meagre languages of the pagan 
tribes to whom he wishes to preach. Their vocabu- 
lary had no words for his ideas. He has to re-create a 
language before he can impart his message. If he try 
to use the terms they have his message is cramped 
within them or defiled by them. 

The fatal though unavoidable error was the attempt 
to express Jesus' Doctrine of the Cross in the termi- 
nology of the Hebrew ideas of sacrifice. His doctrine 
of God crucifying Himself was wide as God. Their 
notion of " expiation " was narrow as Judaism. His 
Truth came down from God. Theirs came up through 
fetishism from primitive savagery. His was the ex- 
pression of God's true disposition. Theirs was the 
expression of human fear and cunning. " I am from 
above, ye are from beneath," was His dictum to the 
Jews. But, unfortunately, the Hebrew sacrificial 
terms had a certain superficial fitness when applied to 



240 THE DOCTRINE OF THE CROSS 

Jesus' life. There was blood in both. There was 
pain in both. Thus their essential antagonism was 
obscured. St. Paul the theologian of the early Church 
strains to make the imagery of expiation fit with 
Jesus' Truth and is constantly perplexed and perplex- 
ing. 1 His clear conception of the spirit of Christ 
strives to find expression in the terms of his inherited 
thought, and bursts the formulas which still constrain 
it. The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews con- 
cludes it altogether within those formulas. 2 The in- 
stinct of the early Christians refused to accept those 
statements, and the Epistle found no place in the New 
Testament Canon until that instinct had been dulled. 
But the Hebrew thought of expiation, which was itself 
a survival from an early savagery, thus became the ac- 
cepted vehicle for the expression of Jesus' doctrine of 
the Cross. The ancient Liturgies embody the idea 
because they were ancient. Formulated by those who 
were reared in Judaism, or in Paganism, whose idea 
of expiation they expressed they have perpetuated the 
confusion which has for so many centuries obscured 
the central Truth of Jesus. The same Hebrew- 
Pagan rationale of Christ's work early became fixed 
in Christian Theology. The Catholic Creeds do not 
contain it, and to this fact above all else they owe 
their universal acceptance. But in the more formu- 
lated " Systems " it has been for fifteen centuries the 

1 Pfleiderer ; Influence of St. Paid, etc., passim. 
2 Rendal; Theology of the Hebrew Christians. 



THE DOCTKIXE OF THE CROSS 241 

organizing principle. Chrysostom, Augustine, Thomas 
and Anselm, each in his own time and sphere of in- 
fluence formulated it and fixed it more and more 
firmly in the popular Christian mind. It finds at once 
its simplest and most naive expression in the Eoman 
Mass. It is equally present, though mixed with other 
elements, in the Anglican Communion Office. It is 
the underlying theology of the Salvation Army. But 
the Christian consciousness has never been easy under 
it. Whenever " the spirit of life which was in Jesus 
Christ " has been strong, this pagan conception of God 
and His attitude toward men has receded. It has 
failed signally as a motive power for righteousness of 
life. Where it has been presented by the missionary 
as the " good-news " of Jesus it has appealed to a mer- 
cenary motive, and led those who accepted it to attempt 
to escape from a threatened peril. For such security 
they have been willing to pay only a minimum of 
self-sacrifice, and to accept but a formal restraint upon 
conduct. To make the appeal successful it has been 
necessary to depict in lurid and fear compelling 
colors the torments of hell. In all its transmutations 
the idea has remained in substance the childish at- 
tempt of the savage to placate or buy off the wrath 
of a maligant and offended god. This is equally true 
whether the victim be thought of as a breadfruit 
offered by a squalid Papuan, a bull by a Judean priest 
upon a brazen altar, or a Man at Golgotha by the un- 
witting jplebescite of a race. The essence of all is the 



242 THE DOCTRINE OF THE CROSS 

same. It is the proposal to purchase from the Al- 
mighty by gifts a release from the penalty of wrong 
deeds. Many influences are now at work to banish 
and drive away this ancient superstition to that evil 
place of ignorance and fear from which it first 
emerged. In the first place, the origin and growth of 
the idea of Sacrifice has begun to be studied. 1 It has 
but lately dawned upon us that races of men are upon 
earth now at every stage of development. There are 
still Edens in which Adams are even now beginning 
to know good and evil. The counterparts of Abraham 
and Moses and David and Ezra live and have lived at 
many places. At a certain primitive stage of progress 
this notion of expiation begins to show itself always. 
It marks a stage of intellectual and moral forwardness. 
It is of the world's childhood. It gathers about it- 
self a cult. It starts with the raw meat proffered to 
an obscure idol, and survives in the adult race until it 
be outgrown. So far from being a system revealed to 
Israel from above, it is seen to be a common trait of 
all people at a certain stage of their immaturity. 

Again, and more specifically, the more careful 
study of the Bible has made it evident that the Sacri- 
ficial System did not in point of fact hold the place 
in Hebrew history which has been traditionally 
assigned to it. 2 This is purely a question of fact. 

1 Spencer ; Data of Ethics, Lubbock ; Primitive Races, Quatrefages; 
The Human Species, etc., etc., etc. 

2 Colenso ; Wellhausen; Robertson Smith ; Driver ; Briggs, etc., etc. 



THE DOCTRINE OE THE CROSS 243 

From investigation it thus appears to be demonstrated 
that Moses, instead of being the founder of a complex 
and symmetrical system of Sacrificial Eitual did but 
limit within the narrowest bounds possible to him a 
habit of belief and worship which his people had in 
common with all peoples of like time and progress. 
Like all prophets he strove to lift them to a higher 
and truer idea of their real relation to God; and, 
like all wise men he allowed some things " owing to 
the hardness of their hearts." It now appears that 
the System attributed to him was not in fact intro- 
duced in his time nor for many centuries afterward ; 
that it cannot claim either his sanction or the sanc- 
tion of God ; that the line of development in which 
he and the Prophets who succeeded him strove to 
lead this people, was one which was obstructed at 
every step by the survival of this Pagan ideal; and 
that, finally, the gorgeous Sacrificial System itself 
came into existence as a recrudescence of a creed 
outworn. So far, then, from being the " ante-type " 
of Christian worship, it seems to have been but a 
pseudo development which perished of its own faulti- 
ness. Jesus was "priest of the order of Melchisedek 
which is king of peace." Moses and the Prophets, not 
Aaron and the Prophets, are in the line of His ascent. 
Again, the generation which has thus come into the 
truth in the study of Anthropology and Biblican Crit- 
icism is the same one which has displayed an alto- 
gether unique solicitude to discover the secret of 



244 THE DOCTRINE OF THE CROSS 

Jesus' power and to translate His spirit into actual 
life. It is most significant that the interest of the 
Christian world has turned away from the study of 
formal Theology to the study of the Life of Christ. 
It seems to be becoming convinced that a false start 
has been made long ago, and seeks to regain that 
place where the paths diverge in order to follow the 
true one under the guidance of Jesus. The religious 
thought of our time is determined to find its way back 
past the Tridentine or Keformation System, past the 
medieval traditions, past the Catholic Creeds, refuses 
to pause with Paul, clamors for the very words of the 
Master. It " would see Jesus." The names most 
widely known in the Christian world of this age 
whether among scholars or people are, Strauss, Bauer, 
Keim, Edersheim, Farrar, Stalker, Drummond, Bruce, 
Brooks. And all for the same reason. They intro- 
duce their readers directly to Christ. They have the 
zeal of a first quest. If Christendom really believed 
that it had already in possession His secret this interest 
could not be awakened. The most epoch making 
book in the religious world for centuries is JEcce Homo. 
Every fresh attempt to learn Christ's secret is inspired 
really by the deep conviction that for some reason and 
in some way it has been lost or overlooked. Can it 
be true that this is the situation ? 

It is certainly the fact that each denomination of 
Christians believes that every other one has in some 
way missed the Truth as it is in Jesus. The Catholic 



THE DOCTRINE OF THE CEOSS 245 

believes this of the Protestant. The Protestant 
believes this of the Anglican ; the Anglican believes 
this of both ; and the Oriental believes this of all. 
May it be that what they all believe is true ? Does 
not the very existence of the belief vindicate its cor- 
rectness ? While they all agree substantially upon 
the facts of Jesus' career and receive the same record 
of His word, they disagree utterly upon the true 
significance of these deeds and the interpretation of 
these words. What will account for these disagree- 
ments but the theory that they have all alike misin- 
terpreted Him ? And if this be true, or if it be only 
partially true, what remains to be done but to go back 
to the beginning and start afresh? This may be a 
humiliating thing to do. For great multitudes of 
Christians it may be an impossible thing to do. 
Nevertheless, it would seem that we have come to the 
place where no other course is open. 

When we come to see that the whole nexus of sac- 
rificial ideas are but the survival of Paganism, and 
Judaism, that its underlying idea is false and immoral, 
unworthy of man and untrue of God ; when we see 
that the Sacrificial System was an intrusion into the 
course of Hebrew development and an obstacle to its 
natural movement ; when we see that the Prophets 
denounced it as paltry and hurtful ; when we see that 
Jesus held aloof both from its facts and its phrases ; 
when we see how and when and why it fastened itself 
upon the Christian Society, surely we must be ready 



246 THE DOCTRINE OE THE CROSS 

to abandon it, and to seek some truer rationale of the 
burdened life and painful death of Christ. It may be 
as well to confess that the task will not be an easy 
one. For in Epistles and Missals, in Liturgies and Con- 
fessions and Sunimge, the substitutionary idea holds the 
field. They all reek of blood ! They all conceive of 
salvation as a commercial transaction. It is a com- 
modity bought with a price. But then, Jesus' real 
doctrine of the Cross is also entangled with them all. 
This has given them their viability. The task now is, 
in a word, to disentangle the Cross from the Altar. 

What, then, is Christ's Doctrine of the Cross ? It 
cannot be more simply stated than in His own phrase ; 
— u If any man is willing to come after Me, let him 
take his cross and follow Me ; for whosoever would 
save his life shall lose it, and whosoever is willing to 
lose his life shall find it." All His words are but the 
expansion of this which He announces as an eternal 
truth. It is true, He says, of Himself, of men, and of 
God. The starting-point of His doctrine is the fact of 
pain and evil in the world. Heretofore, He says, when 
men have tried to resist evil, they have tried to beat it 
back as they would repel a hostile foe, by force. Re- 
sist not evil. To attempt escape from it by resistance 
is as futile as to try to cure a burn by applying fire. 
His Sermon on the Mount is His Pronunciamento. 
Let evil break itself against you ; do not break your- 
self against it, is His secret. And this whether evil as- 
sails in the form of pain or of wrong. If it be pain, 



THE DOCTEINE OF THE CEOSS 247 

turn upon it with love for God, and its sting is gone. 
If it be wrong, turn upon it with love for men, and 
the wrongdoer will be disarmed. Says Mr. John 
Fiske, 

"In the cruel strife of centuries has it not often 
seemed as if the earth were the prize of the hardest 
hearts and the strongest fist ? To many men the 
words of Christ have been as foolishness and a 
stumbling-block, and the Ethics of the Sermon on the 
Mount have been openly derided as too good for this 
world. In that wonderful picture of modern life 
which is the greatest work of one of the greatest seers 
of our time, Victor Hugo gives a concrete illustration 
of the working of Christ's method. In the saint-like 
career of Bishop Myriel, and in the transformation of 
his life-work in the character of the hardened outlaw, 
Jean Valjean, we have a most valuable commentary 
upon the Sermon on the Mount. By some critics who 
would express their views freely about Les Miserables, 
while hesitating to impugn directly the authority of 
the New Testament, Monseigneur Bienvennu was 
unsparingly ridiculed as a man of impossible goodness, 
and a milksop and fool withal. But I think Victor 
Hugo understood the capabilities of human nature and 
its real dignity better than these scoffers. In a low 
state of civilization Monseigneur Bienvennu would 
have had small chance of reaching middle life. Christ 
Himself, we remember, Avas crucified between two 
thieves. It is none the less true that when once the 
degree of civilization is such as to allow this highest 
type of character, distinguished by its meekness and 
kindness to take root and thrive, its methods are in- 
comparable in their potency. The Master knew full 
well that the time was not ripe, that He brought not 
peace but a sword. But He preached, nevertheless, 
that gospel of great joy which is by and by to be 
realized by toiling humanity, and He announced ethical 
principles good for the time that is coming. The 



248 THE DOCTRINE OF THE CROSS 

great originality of His teaching, and the feature 
which has given it its hold upon men, lay in the dis- 
tinctness with which He conceived a state of society 
from which every vestige of strife, and the behavior 
adapted to ages of strife, shall be forever and utterly 
swept away. Through misery which has seemed un- 
endurable, and toil that has seemed endless, men have 
thought on that gracious life and its sublime ideal, and 
have taken comfort in the sweetly solemn message of 
peace on earth and good will to men." 

All this is true and admirable ; but much more is true. 
Jesus announced His ideal of life, not at all as the 
practical solution which a wise man might give to the 
problem of conduct. He announced it as the very 
Word of God. He declares that light and life and 
wisdom are the fruit of love ; and this because God 
has made things so, and because He is so Himself. 
"If ye believe in Me, keep My commandments. I 
have but one commandment : — thou shalt love the 
Lord thy God with all thy heart and soul and mind, 
and thy neighbor as thyself.'' To obey this com- 
mandment is equivalent to taking up the Cross. 
Love, the Cross, and Life, are the motive, the means, 
and the end of existence for all who share the nature 
of God. Whether it be in the person of Jesus Christ 
against whom Hebrew malignity wrecked itself, and 
became forever after impotent ; or Stephen against 
whom Pharisaic hate destroyed itself; or Poly carp 
whose love quenched provincial rage ; or Telemachus 
against whom luxurious cruelty broke itself ; or of 
that innumerable multitude out of every tribe and 



THE DOCTRINE OF THE CROSS 249 

tongue and kindred under heaven who by patient 
continuance in well doing have won their enemies, by 
these and by their method have been won the only 
permanent triumph so far gained. 

The Cross of Christ is not an isolated monument ris- 
ing out of the confused and purposeless waves of life's 
ocean whereto shipwrecked mariners may cling for 
refuge. It is the sailing directions by which the 
voyager guides his craft throughout his whole course. 
Not they who " look only to the Cross for salvation," 
but they who " take up the Cross and follow Him " 
are Christians. The first is a mercenary sentiment 
which defeats itself ; the second is the divine mode of 
life for men. He that saveth his own life, shall lose 
it ; and he that loseth his life for My sake and the 
gospel's shall save it." 

For the gospel's sake. This was His motive. For 
its sake He laid down His life. He declared that His 
laying it down was an act of deliberate choice. " I 
have power to lay it down, and I have power to take 
it up again." It is an area where no compulsion can 
operate. Every man has the same power to lay down 
his life, and if he repent the determination when he 
begins to feel the cost, to take it up again. Jesus laid 
down His life before the world's evil for it to work its 
will upon. He steadfastly refused to save it by taking 
it out of the way of the world's evil. It was easy to 
see what the immediate result would be. " He must 
go to Jerusalem, and suffer many things, and be 



250 THE DOCTRINE OF THE CROSS 

killed." Of course He must. He had started upon a 
Way which led there naturally. He must follow it to 
the end, or else abandon it and turn back. The com- 
pulsion is always from within. The hard and unrea- 
sonable conditions of life may hold the witless rustic 
Simon the Cyrenian and compel him to bear a cross. 
But such a misfortune is an isolated incident without 
spiritual consequences. Jesus' Doctrine of the Cross 
is this : — God suffers because God is Love : men are 
the sons of God, inheriting His nature; they come 
into their inheritance and become masters of life only 
through Love ; and the Cross is the necessity of Love. 

And so, He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was 
crucified, died, and was buried. 

We have seen above that Jesus' Way led Him into 
the possession of a more abundant and potent life 
than any other has shown. This brought Him into 
relation with the physical environment of life. The 
fountain of living flowed so abundantly in Him that 
it was at least once able to pour itself over "the 
wheel broken at the cistern " in the body of his dead 
friend Lazarus, and set it moving again. It flowed so 
purely that it was able to distil clean blood into 
leprous veins. When " virtue went out of him " it 
staunched the unclean wasting of an inform woman's 
life ; lifted the paralytic who could by no means raise 
himself up ; clarified the thick humors of the blind ; 
brought vigor to the distorted legs of the cripple; 
woke the little maid from the sleep of syncope into 



THE DOCTRINE OF THE CROSS 251 

the fresh joy of living. And, in a measure, His dis- 
ciples did the like. They all did it by touch, by im- 
partation, by contagion. Was this " Natural " ? or 
" Supernatural " ? I reply, the antithesis is not legiti- 
mate. He assumes that these and greater works than 
these were natural to men of their sort. They but 
acted in character. His " Disciples " were men who 
by following Him had also become partially conscious 
of like endowments. These powers, He declared, be- 
long to the real nature of man. They are unsus- 
pected, latent, to all practical purposes non-existent in 
the ordinary man. They are awakened into con- 
sciousness and quickened into potency by moral 
processes. He calls this moral process Faith, and 
refers to it as His " Way." " Oh ! ye of little faith," 
He cries to them when they stand helpless in the 
presence of the epileptic whose father begged for 
cure. " These signs shall follow them that believe, 
they shall cast out devils, they shall speak with new 
tongues, they shall take up serpents, if they drink any 
deadly thing it shall not hurt them, they shall lay 
hands on the sick and they shall recover." That is to 
say, the new type of man whom he reveals and who 
is produced from the ordinary type by His Way shall 
be, to such extent as He pursue that Way, freed from 
certain physical limitations, and possessed of physical 
potencies quite unique. They will have life and have 
it more abundantly. This life will naturally safe- 
guard its possessor against many ills, and he will be 



252 THE DOCTRINE OF THE CEOSS 

able to share his abundance — at a cost to himself — 
with the needy. He does not intimate that they will 
be freed from the constant laws of growth, decay and 
dissolution. But that by becoming preeminently 
humane they will be able to resist such evils as flesh 
is not heir to but stands exposed to while it starves 
outside its legitimate inheritance. He says to the 
sick of the palsy, " Thy sins be forgiven thee." He 
associates physical disease with moral lesion. Moral 
purity is, to His mind, the prophylactic against dis- 
ease. It is also the vix medicatrix. According to 
the record, those nearest to Him, and while they were 
sustained in their moral exaltation by His presence 
and contagion, found themselves possessed of strange 
powers, to their exceeding great amazement. " Lord, 
even the devils are subject to us," they report upon 
their return from an excursion. The same " signs " 
showed themselves in a few after he passed away. 
But they became more and more infrequent, and 
finally passed away as the Christians declined from 
their high moral exaltation and Christianity became a 
" Religion " instead of a new power of living. Their 
places came to be occupied by the fantastic " miracles " 
of the middle ages. When the Church as an organiza- 
tion fell away from His Way its members began to 
lack His Life. It took up the sword instead, and all 
unconsciously committed spiritual suicide. 

But for one who held steadfastly to His Way of the 
Cross the issue was Life, a life which physical dissolu- 



THE DOCTRINE OF THE CROSS 253 

tion was powerless to touch. Therefore, He rose 
again from the dead. To such an one death is an 
incident, an episode. He has anticipated it. The 
life which was in Him had been strong enough to 
build up for itself a spiritual body, organized in ad- 
vance in sufficient stability to survive the shock of 
physical dissolution. The life had become the seed 
from which springs the new body. The body is 
not that body which shall be but some other and 
"God giveth to every seed its proper body." So 
Jesus reappeared in a body ; in His own body ; in the 
body which belonged to Him in that stage and progress 
of Life. From the record it is plain that it both was 
and was not " that body which had been." Physical 
identification is only possible where physical tests can 
be applied. In the nature of the case the laws of 
matter, as we know matter, are not available here. 
It is conceivable, and indeed likely, that the distinc- 
tion of " material " and " spiritual " which we make 
between the life which now is and that which is to 
come, is an unwarranted one. Probably they are 
both conditioned by matter. Many things indicate 
that we are on the brink of discoveries in matter 
which will compel a readjustment of all our defini- 
tions. 1 But at all events, no question of material 
identity as we now conceive of matter has any place 
in the doctrine of the resurrection. Jesus' career is 
consistent throughout. By the perfection of His 

1 Dolbear ; Matter, Ether and 3Iotion. 



254 THE DOCTRINE OF THE CROSS 

humanity He became conscious that He was the Son 
of God. By taking up God's manner of life in His 
person of a man He found the Cross upon Him as 
upon the Father. By walking steadfastly in the Way 
of the Cross He found Himself filled with an inex- 
pugnable Life. By the power of the life which was 
in Him He passed through the shock of dissolution 
undisturbed. Being then free from the conditions of 
material existence He moved without let or hinder- 
ance alike into hell and into heaven. In all alike He 
was a Son of Man and a Son of God, and manifested 
the inherent nature and capabilities of both. 



THE OTHEE LIFE 



XV 

THE OTHER LIFE 

It would hardly be too much to say that belief in a 
future life came into human thought as a result of the 
career of Jesus. While it is true that a vague, form- 
less, phantasmal notion of the persistence of the indi- 
vidual after death did obtain in places before him, and 
has been entertained beyond his sphere of influence, 
still it is true historically that the belief in a future 
life owes all its clearness, form, and practical effi- 
ciency to the contribution which he made to it. 
Before him the belief, where it amounted to a belief, 
was practically inoperative on account of its vague- 
ness. In the Homeric poems, for example, the ghosts 
of the departed were thought of as thin shadows of 
their former selves, shivering in the twilight of the 
Underworld. Even Achilles, to whom is assigned 
the kingship among the shades, is represented as 
declaring that he would " rather be the meanest slave 
on earth." When Yirgil depicts the condition of the 
shade of Anchises, his picture is indeed more definite 
than that drawn by Homer, but it is doubtful if its 
very distinctness does not introduce a grotesque ele- 
ment which makes it all the more difficult to receive. 
The immortal dialogue in the Phaedo shows Socrates 

257 



258 THE OTHER LIFE 

and his friends groping in the same vague shadow. 
In the master's mind was alternately " faith crossed 
by doubt and doubt crossed by faith." His abstract 
argument for immortality seems conclusive enough 
qua argument, but it eludes all attempt to picture 
before the imagination the concept with which the 
argument is concerned. The same helplessness marks 
the thought of future life in those places where it 
appears in the Old Testament. It may be said with- 
out much fear of successful contradiction that no 
appeal is ever taken in the Old Testament from the 
life which now is to that which is to come. No possi- 
bility of either bliss or calamity there is ever urged as 
a motive to modify conduct here. And this, notwith- 
standing that a vague belief in the fact of a continued 
existence beyond the grave was widely entertained. 
The reason is plain. The belief lacked form. The 
question, " with what body do they come ? " remained 
unanswered. Lacking an answer to this the belief in 
"immortality" remained an inoperative fancy. The 
transcendent influence of Jesus here is owing to the 
fact that He has supplied a thinkable form for what 
was before an elusive even though persistent instinct. 
It is well to learn once for all that no conscious 
being can exist, or be conceived of as existing, except 
as such a being express itself in terms of matter. For 
consciousness is not possible to any subject except as 
such personality is reflected back upon itself from 
something different in kind from itself. That from 



THE OTHER LIFE 259 

which alone such reaction can come to Spirit is Matter. 
In each personality the spirit asserts its being in self- 
consciousness, but this consciousness of self is simply 
the expression in terms of spirit of the constant law 
that action and reaction are equal and in opposite 
directions. The spirit can only arouse consciousness 
of self by pressing against something which is not 
spirit. It acts outwardly from its own centre, and the 
reaction is consciousness. The spirit can only be 
aware of itself in its successive moments through the 
medium of a body. 1 Jesus has made the belief in 
immortality available by giving it a body. This 
opens the question " How are the dead raised up, and 
with what body do they come ? " There has been a 
strange hesitation in accepting the answer which St. 
Paul gives to the question. His reply is, substantially, 
first, that the body that shall be is not materially 
identical with the body which now is ; and 

Second, that there is provision in the universe to 
furnish forth the spirits which live with bodies com- 
posed of matter spiritual. 2 With the first of these 

1 If it be objected that this reasoning implies the eternity of the 
physical universe as the condition of God's self -consciousness, it is 
sufficient to reply that so far as our capacities of thought are con- 
cerned this is true. Whether it be true ' ' absolutely ' ' or not, one 
cannot either affirm or deny, for he cannot formulate to himself the 
alternative proposition. One cannot think of God without having 
in his mind the material universe as a background against which 
he sets the concept of God. If any one doubt this, let him make 
the experiment. 

2 1 Cor. xv. 35-50. 



260 THE OTHER LIFE 

statements the modern world is in hearty agreement. 
It is so evident that " flesh and blood cannot inherit 
the kingdom of God," that the world of to-day will 
sooner throw away all belief in a future existence 
than entertain the crude notion of a physical resur- 
rection. The qualities of the human body have come 
to be well understood, and it is seen that immortality 
is not only not one of them, but that it is something 
which cannot be impressed upon it. 

The beliefs concerning the future of death which 
have long held the field are three. Either men have 
tried to think of disembodied spirits as passing on and 
enduring ; (Plato, Augustine, Spinoza, Fiske,) or, they 
have thought that the spirit and the body break up to- 
gether and go out together into chaos ; (Moleschott, 
Yirchow, Heackel, Burmeister, Darwin,) or, they have 
thought of the material body being regathered after 
disintegration and endowed with immortality, (Cur- 
rent, so-called " Orthodoxy "). This last has come to be 
the belief of the great mass of Catholics ; probably 
also that of the rank and file of Protestants. A little 
steady reflection will show that none of them can be 
the truth. To consider them in their order, a " disem- 
bodied spirit " is simply an unthinkable pseudo-concept. 
And again, the quality of immortality cannot be pre- 
dicted of a physical body. And finally, to think of the 
personality ceasing with the dissolution of the body is to 
conceive so palpable a violation of the constant law of 
the persistence of force that it is becoming increasingly 



THE OTHER LIFE 261 

hard to believe it. One can see what the physical en- 
ergies of a man are, or at least, how they act and. into 
what they are transformed when death intervenes. 
They can be weighed, traced, accounted for in terms 
of physics. But the psychic energy which has been 
implicated with them demands equally honorable treat- 
ment. If that energy be quenched it must needs be 
by a force which is akin to it. When it disappears its 
exit must be accounted for in terms of some equiv- 
alence. It is difficult to think that the psychic energy 
which has taken to itself a natural vesture moulded to 
its uses, and renewed so many times in the course of 
life, will suddenly find itself shivering in naked im- 
potence to clothe itself and perish for want of a gar- 
ment. It is easier to believe, in the abstract, that 
there is a spiritual body as there is a natural body ; 
and that as we have borne the image of the earthly 
we shall also bear the image of the heavenly. The 
difficulty all along has been to conceive of a body fit- 
ted for the next stage of the soul's existence. There 
are many indications that physical science itself is 
about to bring relief to our thought. 

One of the results of the modern study of Physics 
is that it has compelled us to reopen our accepted def- 
initions of Matter. It is being found not to be the 
" gross stuff " which Plato miscalled it. The studies 
of Lord Kelvin, Hemlholtz, Langley, Dolbear, and 
Tesla and a host of others have transformed our 
conception of the material universe. There is the 



262 THE OTHER LIFE 

matter which we see, feel, touch, weigh, of which our 
senses take cognizance ; and there is also the ethereal 
matter with which all space is filled, with which our 
world is interpenetrated, which obeys laws of its own, 
and which mocks at the limitations of our physical 
laws. For an instance, let one reflect what happens 
when light passes through a block of glass. Light is 
a specific form of undulation in a material medium. 
The waves start from the sun millions of miles away, 
chase one another through what we mistakenly have 
called " empty space," and sweep through the mass of 
glass, one of the densest forms of matter, as water 
flows through a sieve. The waves are propagated 
through a material medium. The ether which trans- 
mits them, and which transmits another wave form 
called magnetism, and still another called heat, is at 
once dense and tenuous, potent and subtile. Matter it 
is, demonstrably, but matter of a sort which defies all 
our definitions. But it is clearly stuff of such a char- 
acter that if by any means a body might be fashioned 
of it for a human spirit, such an embodied and con- 
scious personality, while still in the sphere of Nature, 
would be in a region which, as related to the one in 
which we move, might fairly be called supernatural. 
It would not be unclothed but clothed upon. A new 
mode of existence would be opened up to such a per- 
son. It would be a materially conditioned existence 
of course, but as we have seen, no other mode of ex- 
istence is conceivable. 



THE OTHER LIFE 263 

There is a strange tendency to miss what is the real 
question at stake in all our discussion concerning a 
future life. It is not the question of absolute immor- 
tality. Absolute immortality can never be predicted 
of anything but God the Absolute. The simple prob- 
lem before us is to find some bridge by which to pass 
from the life that now is to a succeeding one. That 
one may not, and by all analogy will not, be endless 
or indefeasible. The question of its duration and of 
its conditions will arise only for those who are in it if 
any such there can be. But at present one can only 
feel like a man crossing a quaking bog, his only task 
being to find a new standing ground as he feels sink- 
ing under him the last tussock in sight. 

The possibility to survive the shock of physical dis- 
solution and to move on in a continuous existence is 
spoken of in the New Testament as Life. It is de- 
scribed as "eternal," with reference not to its duration 
but to its quality. It is not conceived of as the com- 
mon and natural element of all men, but as something 
which is to be striven for strenuously, and which may 
be attained, or may not, as the case may be. 

The notion that every human being is compounded 
of a " body " which is perishable and a " soul " which 
is intrinsically immortal, is a Pagan idea which finds 
no shadow of support in the Christian Scriptures. 
They speak of eternal life not as an endowment but an 
achievement. Jesus reiterates this (Matt. xvi. 25 ; 
John xi. 25, iii. 15, v. 24, iii. 5-7, etc., etc., etc.). St. 



264 THE OTHER LIFE 

Paul explicitly asserts his own uncertainty as to his 
own immortality, and prays " that by any means he 
might attain to the resurrection of the dead, not as 
though he had already attained." (Phil. iii. 11.) The 
problem is then to find a physical basis for the spirits' 
life beyond that point where matter, as we usually 
conceive of it, becomes no longer available, and to as- 
certain what is the nexus between the spirit and such 
a body. It is indeed only the question of the revela- 
tion of mind and matter carried one stage farther than 
the one in which we now live. The general principle 
to be used in its solution is the dictum of St. Paul that 
" God giveth to every seed its proper body." 

The spirit is the Seed. His contention is that the 
strange potency of the seed to take to itself fitting 
matter in which to express itself is a potency which is 
constant and perdures in every region where life 
exists. As there is one kind of flesh of beasts and an- 
other of man, so there are bodies terrestrial and bodies 
celestial. That is to say, as each form of life in the 
ascending scale through the fishes, the birds, the 
mammal and the man " finds itself " in a body of fit- 
ting matter, so, the same law is continued onward 
into the next ethereal stage. Conscious existence is 
everywhere conditioned upon matter. The soul must 
have a body, else it ceases to be a soul. The human 
spirit in building up for itself a physical body uses 
something, more or less, of every element. The body 
of man is the epitome and recapitulation of the ma- 



THE OTHER LIFE 265 

terial universe as the soul is of all orders of all ante- 
cedent forms of life. As the body is closely com- 
pacted together in the womb it passes stage by stage, 
through every step of past cosmical history. The 
man is the microcosm of the life and the matter thus 
far developed. He attains his development by proc- 
esses of which he himself is largely unconscious. 
That is, where he attains at all to the measure of the 
stature of a perfect man. But long before this proc- 
ess reaches completion, it would seem that a new 
process may set in which has its issue in a life which 
in common speech is called Eternal. " Are there few 
then that be saved ? " It would seem so, both by the 
analogy of Nature and by the words of Jesus. " For 
strait is the gate and narrow the way that leadeth unto 
Life and few there be that find it ; for wide is the gate 
and broad is the way that leadeth to destruction, and 
many there be that go out thereat." Life climbs up 
slowly through its ascending orders until self-conscious, 
moral beings such as man is reached. When these pass 
the purely animal stage so far as to be morally self- 
conscious, each one becomes capable of beginning the 
process of building up for itself a body of such stuff as 
will abide. Jesus brings life and immortality to light 
by pointing out the condition upon which perduring life 
depends ; and by displaying in His own person an 
actual instance of such a life. According to Him it 
is contingent upon Moral conditions. He endorses 
that human instinct which has always associated 



266 THE OTHER LIFE 

eternal life with goodness and eternal destruction 
with moral badness. He points out that this is true 
for a reason so simple that it has seemed incredible. 
Sin, in its last analysis is suicide. It is living to the 
present environment at the expense of the next one. 
It is an arrest of development which is punished with 
degradation. All those actions which men agree to 
call morally evil may be reduced to two, which are 
essentially one. They are either Lust or Murder. 
All those multiform immoralities which revolve about 
the fact of sex are forms of the attempt to express the 
sense of living in the terms of flesh. "For lust, 
when it hath conceived bringeth forth sin, and sin 
when it is finished issues in death." It does so be- 
cause it withdraws the vital energy which would else 
be employed in building up the spiritual body, and dis- 
sipates it upon that form of matter which is in its na- 
ture capable of but transiently expressing the life of 
the spirit. On the other hand, all those forms of 
wrong which are called by such names as covetous- 
ness, dishonesty, hate and theft, are but rudimentary 
forms of murder. " He that hateth his brother is a 
murderer," for " hateth any man the thing he would 
not kill ? " He taketh a life who taketh that which 
doth sustain the life ; " and ye know that no murderer 
hath eternal life in Him." Because all life is so 
bound up together, the living spirit who makes a 
murderous thrust at another pierces his own soul. 
Action and reaction are equal and in opposite direc- 



THE OTHER LIFE 267 

tions. It is perillous even to trip up one of the little 
ones. 

We come back then to the dictum of Jesus that 
persistence of living is contingent upon a certain 
mode of living. As St. Paul put it, " he that soweth 
to the flesh shall of the flesh reap destruction ; and he 
that soweth to the spirit shall of the spirit reap life 
everlasting." That is to say, continuitj^ of existence 
is dependent upon moral achievement. As the spirit 
is the substans which determines the form of the 
physical body, so it is conceived to determine the 
form and vitality of the body which shall be. As 
every act of self-consciousness is the occasion of 
complex changes in the molecules of the natural 
body, so it may be thought that concomitant 
changes are produced in the spiritual or ethereal 
body which may be built up simultaneously. 1 

But the condition of the forming of that body is not 
what the champions of the theological doctrine of " Con- 
ditional Immortality " have supposed. It is not con- 
tingent upon the transfer to the soul of any magic 

1 It will be noticed that this way of thinking is substantially that 
hesitatingly put forth by Stewart and Tate in "The Unseen Uni- 
verse." Mr. John Fiske in criticising that book says, that "the 
weakness of their theory lies in the fact that is thoroughly materialistic. ' ' 
It is materialistic, but in this I conceive its strength to be. Mr. Fiske 
opposes to it the pseude concept of a life of pure immortal spirit. It 
is because that concept is practically impossible that the religious 
world has fallen back upon the gross thought of ' ' the resurrection of 
the flesh." It has thus been caught upon the dilemma of either be- 
lieving an incredible thing, or abandoning altogether the belief in a fu- 
ture life. 



268 THE OTHER LIFE 

"grace." It is not dependent upon Baptism. It is 
not contingent upon act of so called "faith." The 
continuity of life is contingent upon the actual ex- 
istence of life. The man who is not really living now 
cannot possibly live hereafter. Jesus' assertion would 
seem to be sufficiently explicit, "except a man be 
born again he cannot enter into the kingdom of God." 
He is not forbidden to do so, but he cannot. " Except 
ye eat My flesh and drink My blood ye have no 
life in you ; " and then He proceeds at once to say that 
eating His flesh is " doing His will." But what was 
and is His " will " ? What other than the irrefragable 
determination of the whole nature toward goodness ? 
The Christian doctrine is that every man is in very 
fact the architect of his own eternal destiny. There 
are two kinds of life possible to every man who has 
arisen to the stage of moral self -consciousness, the life 
to the flesh and the life to the spirit. The first of 
these two modes of vital energy produces the physical 
body which is conducted within what we know as the 
laws of matter. The second carries its personality 
over into a further stage whose mode can only be 
guessed at, or constructed out of analogies. To this 
end the flesh is impotent it is the spirit that quickeneth. 
One might say that the spiritual body is in the natural 
body as the natural body in the womb. At a certain 
stage it is natural for it to be " quickened." (1 John v. 
21, vi. 17, viii. 11 ; Eph. xi. 5 ; Col. xi. 13.) It may 
fail in this and so miscarry. It may come to the birth, 



THE OTHER LIFE 269 

and then perish at any stage before maturity. Bearing 
in mind the two well-known facts, first, that no human 
soul can exist at any stage without a body ; and second, 
that being born does not give any guarantee of con- 
tinuing in life, and with the light which Jesus' career 
and teaching throw upon the problem, we may look 
steadfastly toward the life which is to be. It is the 
passage from one kind of a materially conditioned 
state to another state similarly conditioned. What- 
ever significance the appearance of the risen Lord 
may have beside, this is palpably the first one. It 
demonstrates the possibility of a kind of human life 
so potent and tenacious that it can go on expressing it- 
self in a body after it has passed the frontier of what 
we know as matter. 

How is such a passage effected ? It would seem, by 
all analogy, that by many it is not effected at all. 
Many are dead while they live and they must surely 
remain dead when they die. By many others it is 
probably achieved so incompletely that they pass into 
the next stage as Kichard complained that he had 
been thrust into this, " scare half made up." It is at- 
tained by those in whom the spirit has antecedently 
gathered to itself a form built up of some substance 
which can be the physical basis of the next one. Prob- 
ably , if by any means we attain to the resurrection of the 
dead we will find the change to be much smaller than 
we imagine. But the essential mystery must be the 
same " there " as " here." The nexus between 



270 THE OTHER LIFE 

psychical and physical energy, between thought and 
matter, between soul and body, can never be stated. 
For, being a phenomenon which concerns both mind 
and matter it can never be stated in terms of either 
one. The sum of our information would seem then to 
be that if one be " born again " and if the spiritual 
body which such birth compels be sufficiently devel- 
oped, it passes with the spirit into the new life as the 
natural body arrived with it into this one. The 
natural life is the period of gestation for the spiritual 
life. The spiritual body is in embryo. Where it is 
sufficiently developed to perdure the shock of physical 
dissolution, then by death it is born into a new en- 
vironment. Of course, all language is inadequate in 
this discussion. But the metaphor used by St. Paul 
has become classic. The physical body is the seed 
which encloses a germ. It must die and unwind its 
integuments. From it the spiritual body springs. In 
any case the seed must perish. This would seem to be 
true of men as it is of wheat or any other grain. But 
whether it shall arise into a renewed life depends upon 
its own vital energy. The chrysalis may arise a 
winged and decked citizen of the air, it may dis- 
integrate in a silken shroud from which nothing comes, 
or it may emerge a puny weakling only to flutter for 
a little while in its new home before it perish finally. 
This is the second death. 

For all this Jesus stands ; for the belief that each 
man born into the world is capable of being born 



THE OTHER LIFE 271 

again ; for the truth that the new birth is correlated 
with moral energy; that physical death is only an 
episode in the career of such a twice-born man ; that 
the hold of such a newborn soul upon the material 
universe is so strong as to bend fit matter to its need 
at every stage of its progress ; of all this Jesus is the 
revealer and the instance. 

It will be seen that there is no room in this concep- 
tion of " the Life of the world to come " for either the 
modern Catholic doctrine of Purgatory, or the Protes- 
tant belief that the article of death fixes indefeasibly 
the destiny of every man. 1 

1 1 am aware that Anglicans entertain some notion concerning an 
"Intermediate State," but the contents of that belief is so obscure 
that it is difficult to ascertain with precision what it is. 



THE HOLY CATHOLIC CHUKCH 



XVI 

THE HOLY CATHOLIC CHUECH 

The Holy Catholic Church is an article of faith only 
and not a demonstrable fact. The only reasonable at- 
titude toward it is the same as that toward God, the 
Incarnation, the Eesurrection, or the Future Life. 
The Holy Catholic Church is not a thing which has 
been seen, or which can be seen now, but an ideal fact 
toward which Christ's disciples move and by which 
they are moved. The Church is happily defined as 
" the blessed company of all faithful people ; " but in- 
asmuch as there have never been any people altogether 
faithful there has never been the Church of which 
very great blessedness could be predicated. 

It is not uncommon to find people who hold this 
article of the creed in quite a different way from what 
they do the others. They are somewhat shocked and 
scandalized when they are reminded that the Church 
is a belief and not a demonstrable phenomenon. They 
had supposed that it was the latter. The fact that 
they were not able to point to it and say — " there is 
the Church which satisfies the definition," does not 
disturb them. Such Churchmen have the curious 
power to personify an abstraction in the religious 
sphere as similar persons have in the political sphere. 

275 



276 THE HOLY CATHOLIC CHUECH 

In the one they call the creation of their fancy The 
Church ; in the other they call it The State. There are 
many persons who actually believe in a democracy 
who still speak of a " State " to which, in their opinion, 
many of the ordinary functions of society should be 
intrusted, forgetting that they themselves are the 
State. In like manner many think of the Church. 
To it they attribute the qualities of holiness, wisdom, 
purity, and other transcendental attributes, forgetting 
that they themselves are the Church. 

The Church, in point of fact, has never been either 
one, holy or catholic, but it has nevertheless held 
within it these ideals as goals toward which it has 
moved. They are ideals which no other institution 
known among men has ever seriously set before itself. 
It seems clear that Jesus proposed to convey His 
influence forward in time and outward in space by 
means of an organization. His favorite phrase was 
"My Kingdom." It is quite true that His formula 
The Kingdom of Heaven was His expression for a 
regime of holiness. It meant that condition of human 
society which in His Way of living should be uni- 
versally adopted. But it seems equally plain that His 
hope was to bring in the universal Kingdom toward 
which He looked by first setting up a small and per- 
fect organization into which could be gathered those 
few who were ready to begin at once the new manner 
of life. He proposed that the little flock would 
gradually expand in numbers, and grow more and more 



THE HOLY CATHOLIC CHURCH 277 

pure in quality, until it should absorb and assimilate 
the race. The marks or " notes " of this Society were 
to be, unity of feeling and purpose, purity of life and 
thought, and complete hospitality for all who were 
willing to adopt this way of life. That is to say, it 
was to be One, Holy, Catholic. The three permanent 
institutions which He Himself established within the 
Society corresponded to this purpose. The Lord's 
Supper is the symbol of unity ; Baptism with water is 
the symbol of holiness ; Preaching is the symbol and 
instrument of Catholicity. 

It is easy to see that He proceeded after the most di- 
rect and straightforward manner to attain this end. He 
surrounded Himself with a small but very compact 
body of men and women who are from the first spoken 
of as His disciples. The test of admission which He 
applied was the most rigorous conceivable. In the 
language of the Baptist, He winnowed them as with a 
fan. " If ye will do My will " was His test. We have 
already examined at length what His will was. This 
test did not address itself to any intellectual or social, 
or even to any conventionally religious qualities. He 
did not attempt any hard and fast delimitations of 
His Society. He was content to let any one join it 
who would. But He set free a force within it whose 
potency He serenely rested upon to either transform 
or eject every one who came within its influence. 
Sometimes it did the one, sometimes it did the other. 
Of one man it is accurately stated that " He went out 



278 THE HOLY CATHOLIC CHURCH 

from us because He was not of us, for if He had been 
of us He would no doubt have remained with us." But 
the Society was sufficiently compact and its frontier 
sufficiently defined from the beginning for the pur- 
pose it had to subserve. The history of the Christian 
Church is a strange story, not so much on account of 
its romantic fortunes, but because there has wrought 
within it and upon it a force which has no analogy in 
any other organization. It is not surprising that Gib- 
bon misinterpreted it. Its actual existence has so 
little corresponded to its own ideal, while at the same 
time, it has held so tenaciously to its ideal, that men 
have been puzzled. It must be borne in mind that it 
began not as it would, but as it could. The material 
upon which the ideal began its work was most un- 
promising. It would be hard to conceive of a pre- 
vious training more unsuited to their ultimate purpose 
than was that of the Twelve. All their habits of 
thought, all their prejudices and preconceptions, all 
their environment were unfavorable. And the larger 
company of the disciples were like them. Eeared in 
Hebrew exclusiveness they were to become the 
apostles of humaneness. Themselves the product of a 
religion which looked chiefly upon ceremonial purity, 
they were to become the ensamples of ethical holiness. 
Full of the spirit of prejudice and caste they were to 
be the champions of universality. It is not to be 
wondered at that they fell far below the ideal of 
Christ's Society. That they did fall far short of it is 



THE HOLY CATHOLIC CHURCH 279 

evident to any who reads the record without pre- 
judice. 

Both probability and fact warn us against looking 
to "The Primitive Church" as the realization of 
Christ's ideal. It was not that, and it is evident that 
He did not expect it to be. The Church is an organ- 
ism and follows the law of all organisms. Its nor- 
mal type is to be sought for not at its beginnings, but 
after it has had time and opportunity to develop. It 
is because men have thought of it as a mechanical 
structure that they have so largely fallen into miscon- 
ception concerning the Early Church. But the thought 
of our day is becoming biological here as everywhere, 
and replacing the mechanical modes which have pre- 
vailed. The difference between an organization and an 
organism is vital. If the Church were an artificially 
manufactured structure it would be at its best at its be- 
ginning. If on the other hand it be a living organism 
its perfection of existence must be looked for after it has 
had time to grow. It may be said in passing, that all 
questions concerning the divine right of Episcopacy or 
of the Papacy or of any other method of organization, 
or concerning the mode of Baptism, and all like con- 
tentions, have their rationale in that mechanical con- 
ception of the Church which is becoming more and 
more powerless to hold men's thoughts. Whenever 
the Church comes to be conceived of as living, all these 
questions recede or take an altogether different form. 
Prescription ceases to impress with a sense of obliga- 



280 THE HOLY CATHOLIC CHUECH 

tion. We become easy when history uncovers defects 
which would otherwise strain our faith. The actual 
present condition of things becomes intelligible, and 
our hope for the future revives. When one looks 
abroad upon the Church to-day it is hard to discern its 
unity. In fact it is not one. Nor can one candidly say 
that it is either holy or catholic. If we must sup- 
pose that at any point in its history it has been all 
these, then we must say that it has ceased so to be. 
And with that conviction dies all hope for its future. 
For a living organism which has once been defeated 
in its purpose of life dies. And it is never resuscitated. 
If the Church ever displayed the note of Unity, 
when was it ? Certainly not in the Apostles' time. 
" One said I am of Paul, and another I am of Apollos, 
and another I am of Cephas." The Jews and the 
Hellenists were at odds within the Church from the 
very beginning. Nor was it about trivial matters 
they disagreed ; it was about questions which touched 
the very fundamentals of the Faith. It was concern- 
ing the essential quality of human nature, as between 
Paul and James. It was about the catholicity of 
Christianity, as between Paul and Peter. It is 
seriously to be questioned whether they were agreed 
as to the nature of Christ Himself. Was it in " the 
period of the Councils " ? — or in the " time of the 
Fathers " ? I have read the Fathers, both post — and 
ante-Nicene. At one time I thought to find in them 
a picture of life and action of a holy, united and 



THE HOLY CATHOLIC CHUECH 281 

catholic Church. I have not found in them either 
unity of conception concerning the Church, or con- 
spicuous holiness of thought, or any real idea of cath- 
olicity. I know that wise and good men have found 
all these things there, but I have not been able to do 
so. And I have been forced to the thought that those 
who have found these notes present have done so 
because they have brought them with them. What 
Council is there which did not rise out of antecedent 
lack of unity as its occasion ? And what Council can 
be pointed to as one which secured unity as a result 
of its deliberations or its canons? What is Nice? 
or Chalcedom ? or Constantinople ? or Florence ? or 
Trent ? or the Vatican ? To ask these questions is to 
answer them for any one who holds by facts and not 
by theories. At no point in her career has the Church 
been able to give anything like a unanimous reply to 
any question of either Doctrine or Discipline. The 
dictum of Yincent of Lerins " Quod semper, quod 
ubique, quod ab omnibus" is the most impotent of 
fetiches. Of course, if it only means to say that 
everybody is wiser than anybody, nobody will ques- 
tion it, and in that case it need not be quoted in Latin. 
But if it be offered as a practical test of any single 
dogma or custom, there is not one which can endure 
it. ISTo one can be instanced which has been held 
" always, everywhere, and by everybody." Even at 
those times when the outward organization has been 
most powerful and when a large unity of action has 



282 THE HOLY CATHOLIC CHURCH 

been practiced, there have been ftying columns which 
refused to march with the main body, and declined to 
take their orders from the recognized authority. 

And all that has been said concerning the note of 
Unity is equally true as to the notes of Holiness and 
Catholicity. They have never been exhibited. 

And yet I believe in one, holy, Catholic Church. I 
believe in it. If it were a matter of experience, or if 
it were demonstrable by any process it would not 
rightfully have a place in the creed. One does not 
say credo of things about which he can say scio. But 
I am quite aware that the contents of my belief are 
not the same as that of many of my brethren. They, 
fondly as it seems to me, believe in a perfect Church 
which has been and is lost ; while I believe in one 
which never has been, but surely will be. My faith 
looks to the future, not to the past, however sacrosanct 
that past may be thought to have been. Not that I 
am unmindful of the past. It is only by examining 
the path of evolution of a living organism that one 
can give any forecast of its future. The history of 
the Church, whether written in the Old Testament or 
in the New, or in the Fathers or Decrees of Councils, 
is "profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correc- 
tion, for instruction in righteousness." 



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